Anne Schneider

‘Ableger / Lessening Fold’

21er Haus, Vienna

5 December 2015 — 17 January 2016

The title of the exhibition, ‘Ableger / Lessening Fold’, makes reference to two fundamental processes in Anne Schneider’s artistic work: An ‘Ableger’ is a cutting, taken from a plant in order to grow another— in other words, a means of propagation. Metaphorically, it represents Schneider’s processes of thinking and working. ‘Ableger’ literally translates as ‘deposition’ and depositing is a key component of her practice. "New conceptual connections and formations arise from depositing things. This tendency to let things rest and accumulate initially generates chaos, which I can use as a source of creativity and allows to formulate something new through the deliberate repetition of individual connections," the artist explains. ‘Lessening Fold’ refers to the formal aspect of Schneider’s work and to the creation of folds through the squeezing and compressing of volumes.
Working on and with volume is the basis of every sculptural process, be it an additive process of building something or the subtractive revelation of a sculpture through the removal of materials. Anne Schneider deploys both methods, working with materials such as wax, concrete, jute, and metal. These everyday materials afford the artist considerable freedom. Jute is generally used to make sacks to be filled with other things. Schneider uses second-hand jute, which is actually a waste material of little value. In doing so, she undermines the established hierarchy of materials. Wax, too, is an everyday material— reversible and malleable. Her hands-on approach to these materials allows her to work in an almost improvisatory fashion, whose sketchlike nature reveals the creative process to the viewer. Even when she is working with concrete, the gestures and touch are evident—not in the form of handprints but in the impressions of seams, which render the production process legible. Anne Schneider sews jute into negative forms and fills them with concrete. Normally any such moulds are made of rigid materials in order to achieve precise results. However, textile moulds are limp, which means that bulges and even folds occur as they are filled. Thus, the cast from what was once a basically geometric form can take on an organic, almost anthropomorphic aspect, its soft curves contrasting starkly with its hard material qualities.
What is more, many of Anne Schneider’s concrete objects are pink or skin-colored, which merely heightens the sense of corporeality. The organicity of these objects gives them subjectivity and character. Like living beings, they sit and stand. By contrast, another cycle of works, Bodies, bears the anthropomorphic connection in its title but not in its appearance. These are figurative objects, reminiscent of items of furniture, whose potential use references the body. Their evocative power lies in the absence of the body, while at the same time inscribing the body into the sculpture itself.
The public space of the exhibition suggests the private space of a living room. Architecture is a recurrent motif in the work of Anne Schneider, as is the notion of perception through time and motion. Two of the objects in the exhibition, for instance, are positioned like lions flanking a gateway, through which the visitor must pass only to be confronted by a black wall of wax. Privacy and intimacy are dissected and presented in the public space, yet instead of illustrating a domestic space, this configuration is the domestication of public space. Schneider counters modernism and its rationalisation of life by creating something organic and a place of respite within the White Cube.
This, then, is how Anne Schneider has conceived the exhibition: as a place for slowing down, for coming down. By focussing on everyday materials, to which she personally relates and which she handles in ordinary ways, like sewing, the artist underlines a contemplative aspect of her art. This is not so much about confrontation as about engagement. The bodily perception of the exhibition thus becomes an experience of the mind, relieving inner tensions by lessening folds.

Anne Schneider, born in 1965, lives in Vienna. Her works have been on display in the exhibitions Care at Interstate Projects in New York (2015) and Oysters with Lemon at Ventana in Brooklyn (2015), at the Minerva Gallery in Sydney (2015), at Supergood in Vienna (2015), at the Salzburger Kunstverein (2014), in anthropomorph und unähnlich at the Galerie Christine König in Vienna (2011), and in Nichts ohne den Körper at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz (2008), among others.

Till Megerle

‘Donkeys’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

29 October — 29 November 2015

An artist is first and foremost occupied with finding opportunities to communicate. Drawings are situated outside a discourse of representation and hence offer a high level of artistic freedom, which is also created by the low-threshold conditions of production: drawing is practical and cheap; drawings can be made everywhere and at any time. It is for that reason that people like to assume that drawings possess a certain immediacy; they tend to psychologize them. Till Megerle’s works on paper appear to evade such interpretations, however. The artist’s drawings are on display in the 21er Raum of the 21er Haus from 29 October to 29 November 2015.
The medium makes it possible to adopt vocabularies to then formulate ideas in different ways. Till Megerle uses the resulting gestures like individual signs or letters, which—repeatedly pieced together anew—result in constructions that can be “read.” Yet he thwarts this interpretation by using styles like empty phrases and by exchanging them from drawing to drawing. Our reception is embroiled in a game of hide-and-seek between what we see and what we project onto those images; and it is made unstable by the concurrence of proximity and distance. In the early romantic period Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “In every good poem everything must be intentional and everything must be instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.” Megerle also combines reflection and intuition—or the mind and the gut, distance and proximity—in his drawings in order to generate intensities.
Concurrence within a dualism is also true of Gnosticism. Between 200 BCE and 300 CE, various Gnostic teachings were based on their belief in a fundamentally malevolent, material world (humans—both body and soul—included) in contrast to a good, all-embracing god. However, as he is torpid, the malevolent gods are worshiped instead. “Thus the adoration of an ass-headed god (the ass being the most hideously comic animal, and at the same time the most humanly virile) seems to me capable of taking on even today a crucial value: the severed ass’s head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism’s most virulent personifications,” wrote Georges Bataille in his 1930 essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.”
Till Megerle appropriates the motif of an ass’s head for his series of drawings. He adopts the subject complex as an atmospheric picture that he finds interesting: this is a case of Bataille as a pop motif and not neo-surrealism. As Bataille observes, the donkey offers considerable identification potential. While the horse embodies an ideal of beauty, the donkey is its brother with lesser qualities. The horse represents high culture, the ass the circus: it harbors an element of subversion; it is the manifestation of unfettered, dark materialism.
The artist has drawn most of his donkeys in a caricatural style. The idea of caricature has always had a particular appeal for Megerle because it requires the artist to try not to be authentic, but rather to speak about objects in an artistic form. Caricature is not in itself a style of expression, but rather an artificial style that is distanced from reality to a certain degree and hence facilitates the creation of suspension between reflection and intuition. It is therefore unsurprising that Megerle draws on the caricatural repertoire of the 19th century—for example the work of Wilhelm Busch—in another series. Busch’s works can be read as amusing stories, but also as illustrations of Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas. Among other topics, Schopenhauer’s philosophy revolves around will, the strongest manifestation of which being the only temporarily satisfiable sex drive.
We now come to the heart of Till Megerle’s works, whether they are photographs or drawings. It is not only the donkeys’ heads that deal with corporeality—or more precisely, corporeal complications—with physique in an adverse or unconfident condition. In his daily artistic practice, Megerle subsumes individual gestures into meticulous frameworks. Doubt is cast on the resulting constructions, which are reduced to only a few sheets. This distillate is succinct, but its few marks leave intact a space for discourse around body politics, sexuality, and interpersonal power structures, which is revealed between the lines of his drawings.

Till Megerle was born in 1979 and lives in Vienna and Berlin. Most recently, his works have been on display at William Arnold in New York (2015), at the Kunstverein Freiburg (2015), at Christian Andersen in Copenhagen (2014), at Galerie Micky Schubert in Berlin (2014), at Diana Lambert in Vienna (2013), and at Center in Berlin (2012).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

‘Flirting with Strangers’

Herbert Albrecht, Franz Amann, Martin Arnold, Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Franz Barwig the Elder, Georg Baselitz, Herbert Bayer, Herbert Boeckl, Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Cäcilia Brown, Gerard Byrne, John Chamberlain, Lovis Corinth, Josef Dabernig, Svenja Deininger, Thomas Demand, Verena Dengler, Carola Dertnig, Gerald Domenig, Heinrich Dunst, Angus Fairhurst, Gelitin, Bruno Gironcoli, Carl Goebel the Younger, Roland Goeschl, Dan Graham, Robert Gruber, Julia Haller, Swetlana Heger & Plamen Dejanoff, Alois Heidel, Damien Hirst, Benjamin Hirte, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Kathi Hofer, Lisa Holzer, Judith Hopf, Bernhard Hosa, Kurt Hüpfner, Christian Hutzinger, Lukáš Jasanský & Martin Polák, Anna Jermolaewa, Ernst Juch, Birgit Jürgenssen, Tillman Kaiser, Luisa Kasalicky, Michael Kienzer, Erika Giovanna Klien, Jakob Lena Knebl, Kiki Kogelnik, Nathalie Koger, Peter Kogler, Oskar Kokoschka, Cornelius Kolig, Elke Krystufek, Hans Kupelwieser, František Kupka, Maria Lassnig, Sonia Leimer, Anita Leisz, Sherrie Levine, Thomas Locher, Sarah Lucas, Marko Lulić, Christian Mayer, Dorit Margreiter, Christoph Meier, Carl von Merode, Alois Mosbacher, Matt Mullican, Edvard Munch, Flora Neuwirth, Oswald Oberhuber, Nick Oberthaler, Walter Obholzer, Giulio Paolini, Elisabeth Penker, Rudolf Polanszky, Lisl Ponger, Antonín Procházka, Florian Pumhösl, Bernd Ribbeck, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Anton Romako, Anja Ronacher, Wally Salner, Christian Schwarzwald, Johannes Schweiger, Martina Steckholzer, Edward Steichen, Rudolf Stingel, Gerold Tagwerker, Rosemarie Trockel, Esin Turan, Salvatore Viviano, Johannes Vogl, Maja Vukoje, Rebecca Warren, Christoph Weber, Letizia Werth, Franz West, Sue Williams, Robert Wilson, Erwin Wurm, Otto Zitko, Heimo Zobernig; curated by Severin Dünser and Luisa Ziaja

21er Haus, Vienna

9 September 2015 — 31 January 2016

Why not, for once, look at a collection as a fabric of relationships among things and their encounters? And as an opportunity that, as Baudrillard put it, might establish an ‘everyday prose of objects, […] a triumphant unconscious discourse’? Picking up on this idea, Flirting with Strangers, the autumn exhibition on the ground floor of the 21er Haus, stages an exciting, playful, and sometimes also unexpected encounter of works from the collection. Is it necessary to have many things in common to “strike up a conversation”, or is it rather individual peculiarities that will ignite a spark?
Works of art are objects to which a particularly high degree of individuality is ascribed: none exactly resembles the other, and they are characterised by their uniqueness. This is why they are usually also considered worth collecting. Once chosen, they become one among many, which is one of the paradoxes inherent to collecting of comparing what is incomparable. Museum collections are generally associated with the systematisation of objects according to scientific categories and art historical classification criteria that are apt to establish connections, make sense, and, as powerful entities of interpretation, produce authoritative knowledge. And exhibitions are, after all, organisations and arrangements of knowledge, which, however, also have the potential to conceive alternative interpretations and that enable actualisation.
Flirting with Strangers presents works by more than one hundred artists in a show that seeks to rethink the format of a collection exhibition: it deliberately unfolds along achronological lines and independent of the history of styles while occasionally emphasising seemingly negligible aspects or similarities that might be far fetched – with the intention to sharpen our focus on detail and the individual piece and at the same time to propose possible unexpected relationships among things.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

‘I am intact and I don‘t care’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

20 March — 14 April 2013

Lili Reynaud-Dewar is interested in identity. Her own one is adressed as well as complex cultural stereotypes. She negotiates mythic, historical and biographic issues on one level while uncovering formal, fictional as well as symbolic potentials. Research and Performance are her tools for that, and the stage-like-ness her language.

Since January, Reynaud-Dewar is artist in residence at the Belvedere. She developed a new series of works in situ, that she now presents at the 21er Raum. An ensemble of furnishings was the output, coming close to an idea of what the artist‘s bedroom might look like.

"What if being an artist led to not having a room of one‘s own but instead many rooms of many owns? Many identical bedrooms decorated with flowers, fruits and liquids. It may also mean making oneself visible and available, always somehow reachable, all in one glance. In my many identical bedrooms I bleed, I dance, I work, I cry. I am no longer private: everything is on view. They say we have entered some time of visibility. With it comes repetition, repetition, repetition. My bedrooms are a cycle, my body is a material accessible via flat screens, my thoughts are recycled. Degradation occurs. Exhaustion occurs. Distraction occurs.

The fountain is a tribute, a monument even, or a metaphor to writers who use their own life as the source of all their work. The ones who reject the novel, the fable, the invention of characters and plots, the protocols of fiction and … the metaphor. One of them, Guillaume Dustan, described his intense -and repetitive- sexual life with accurate precision. He coined a term for the genre he favoured: ‘autopornobiography’. In his books he also bled, danced, worked, cried. His last book was titled ‘Premier roman’ (First Novel). His first book was titled ‘Dans ma chambre’ (In My Room). My room is dedicated to this book. Although Dustan remained little read, he influenced a generation of french (maybe parisians) young people. His image circulated via some screens -like the one of the tv, where he liked to go wearing a wig- and finally it didn‘t circulate anymore, probably because it had been repeated and degraded in some inappropriate ways. But, if you‘d like to, you could repeat the videos of his tv appearances endlessly on your personal screen.

This bedroom that you are standing in right now is modeled according to its circulation and replication imperatives. Yes it will be repeated. Little variations will occur in the next versions. Maybe a slightly bigger bed, some images of men having sex pasted in the back of the colorful panels, a video screen that folds into some secret cabinet, a fountain of colored ink instead of black. Or maybe it will be repeated as such, like a copy of itself, a little bit ludicrous. And at some point it won‘t circulate anymore, probably because it will have been repeated and degraded in some inappropriate ways." (L.R.-D.)

Lili Reynaud-Dewar lives and works in Paris and Grenoble. Recent exhibitions include shows at Magasin, Grenoble, 2012; Bielefeld Kunstverein, Bielefeld, 2011 and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2010. She has also contributed to many international exhibitions including La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012; The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2011 and Elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009. Her plans for 2013 encompass solo exhibitions at Kunstraum Innsbruck and Le Consortium, Dijon, and participating in the Lyon Biennale.

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Adriana Lara

‘Less is More’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

24 September — 26 Oktober 2014

Adriana Lara is interested in the interplay between the things in the world, their appearance, their linguistic and symbolic representation and the problems thereby emerging. Her exhibitions operate like models of the correlations of the order of things and signs, handing over questions of interpretation and meaning to the viewer. She is pursuing a very playful, post-conceptual practice, in which contents are treated on an equal footing with their objects and their sensual experience, realizing works depending on the matter in question in a variety of materials and media.

The realization of artworks is also the focal point of her exhibition at 21er Raum. What does production actually mean, what does it imply? What are the expectations that works should fulfill, and are there promises that artists should neglect? Adriana Lara answers with a series of gestures that are echoing the title of the show. An intervention in spike art quarterly spread over several pages reads as an endless sequence of zeros after a dot, ending with a ‘1’. It represents a cipher which gets smaller (but more expensive as magazine space) as it grows in pages, literally embodying the exhibition title “Less is More”. 

Toilet seats arranged at same height along the wall (“Beneath Technology #1-5”) and hung just like one does with art can be interpreted in this direction, too. On the one hand, their presentation as objects of art alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” and his reduction of production to a concept or idea. On the other hand, the plastic objects refer to the symbolic capital of what is legitimate, the toilet seat as an institutional symbol. Behaving like monochrome paintings or heraldic plaques, the toilet covers sit on quite literal zeros. Their function is reduced to a visual experience, directing the view like a frame to what lies beneath: the wall. While the zeros beneath are always concealed and simultaneously disclosable, the pieces are hung in variable positions along the room, suggesting what lies beneath them at times, obviating them at others. 

The architectural intervention in the room titled “The Real Estate” is imitating angled walls found in top floor apartments, former attics reducing the space in a ‘productive’ way, as the artist states. This reductive act of production is complemented with one of the toilet seats hung in the slanted wall that opens slightly by the force of gravity. The decline of the wall is repeated in a photograph next to it. It shows an Austrian porcelain figurine, which went wrong in the oven. It can’t stand on its own, but in this case gravity is subverted with the help of photographic framing. Deprived of its function as a commercial object, the figurine is obsolete and stored for didactic purposes in the Augarten Museum workshop, and yet it is still not exempt of eventual symbolic capital. This transformational moment is also topic of the video that Lara filmed at Kunsthistorisches Museum and describes the trajectory of the archeological Egyptian objects from being found, distributed, unearthed, packed and shipped to its installation at the 19th century museum. Opposite to this, there is a crate, hung like a painting, found in the 21er Haus depot. This also recalls structurally caused transformation processes, except in this case, it recalls the minimum value perhaps equal to the number in the magazine – compared to the Marcel Broodthaers work that it carried inside, now hanging outside, in another exhibition on the same floor of the Museum.

While the relation of production and reduction is explored, the concept of meaning and significance is presented in its exponential condition – frozen in a stage of potentiality. 

Adriana Lara was born in Mexico City in 1978, where she lives and works. She works in parallel for Perros Negros, a curatorial collective co-founded by her in 2003 as editor of the yearly magazine Pazmaker. Her work has been recently shown in the following exhibitions: Let's Not Jump Into Concrete, Independenza, Rome (solo, 2014); Marrakech Biennale 5 (2014); Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); NY-USA, Algus Greenspon, New York (solo, 2012); S.S.O.R., Kunsthalle Basel (solo, 2012); and Scryyns and Interesting Theories, Air de Paris, Paris (solo, 2012).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Anna-Sophie Berger

‘let rise, let go’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

6 — 30 November 2014

Upon entering Anna-Sophie Berger’s show at the 21er Raum, one encounters a distinctive scent of freshly baked bread. Bread as a basis for nutrition is synonymous with our existential needs. The “daily bread” can be seen as a symbol of the emergence of human culture, of the simple procedure and recipe that includes the baking of material as the basis of human production, which is expressed through its various religious and social connotations. 

Anna-Sophie Berger uses whole-grain bread sculptures as manifestations of deceleration and negotiates degrees of cultural fragmentation and uprooting: with hardly more than a week spent at the same place, the contemporary artist’s daily routines can hardly be defined by geographic characteristics. The baking of bread, together with the everyday life of the artist’s mother as a counterpart to that of a digital native fathoms ideas of home and belonging, questions for stable elements that depend on a predefined structure as, for example, a list of ingredients. 

In the present case, baking bread can be seen here as sculptural production, even though the outcome is ephemeral. The bread loaves are not processed for conservation, but are, on the contrary, hardening during the course of the exhibition to be finally shredded and fed to animals, by which the cycle is closed.

Bread and its organic lability are representative of a material reality that contrasts the textile panels and their respective motifs. Digital photographs are printed on various polyester fabrics whose textile structure imitates such natural textiles as silk or cotton. The images have been selected from a multitude of snapshots taken compulsively with a mobile phone camera – fragments of Anna-Sophie Berger’s everyday life. She describes the pictures as “visual illustration of an incessant thought process”, and the panels “as an attempt to probe the relation between material and information”.

The panels are up to 65 feet long, each confined to a single image repeating itself and referring ever again to the difference between digital and physical quantity. The pixelated grain of the enlarged photographic material formally makes for a poetic effect, suggesting closeness while romanticizing rather than documenting a situation. Depicted are a chess piece from the Medieval Collection of the Cloisters Museum in New York, gems from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, a molecular cooking dish, eggshells, and a broken salad plate – intact and fragmented objects of a very distinct physical materiality and texture – cultural artifacts and food. Digitally processed before having been printed, they are already artificial representations of natural surface qualities. The juxtaposition mirrors the perception of a specific space that Berger inhabits as an artist tourist, oscillating between cultural reception, artistic agent, and the daily commodity of nutrition regardless of place and context. 

Both groups are charged with contemporary doubts about cultural affiliation, internationality, identity, location of self, geopolitics, and ethical goals – emphasized by the text collages on the glass works. Notes taken simultaneously in time and space complete the inner discourse. As fragments of thoughts they indicate a certain conflict, a persistent hovering between options.

What are we to eat if emotions and individual socialization define our consumption just as much as ecological and ethical reflections should, whilst keeping in mind financial reality? How can our needs be sustainably satisfied and what can we feel responsible for? What could be the balance between life and its virtual representation?

Berger’s exhibition in the 21er Raum reflects on the complex relation between social needs, political responsibility and economic reality. A desire for certain things seems to override the capacity to judge one’s own decisions sufficiently. The impossibility to do the one right thing is reflected in an interplay between yielding and resisting, warm and cold – silk and cotton. Her works try to fathom a balance between the immateriality of a digital world and a still-physical human existence, in the end negotiating material itself. What is the form and texture of an image? Objects of both symbolic and emotional value within a loop of material representations is what Anna-Sophie Berger leaves you with: A confusion by relating the self to a changing world where effigy and objects tend to be more and more indistinguishable.

Anna-Sophie Berger’s work negotiates specific characteristics of material and production while reflecting upon the context of objects and their distribution. Her work probes the boundaries of disciplines and their fluent transitions in order to reach a critical understanding of individual motivations and feelings. She is interested in the daily tension between physical reality, sensual needs of a social being, and an increasingly digital perception of life.

Anna-Sophie Berger was born in Vienna, where she lives and works, in 1989. Her work has recently been shown at Mauve (Vienna), JTT (New York), Mathew (Berlin), Suzanne Geiss Company (New York), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), and Clearing (Brussels).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Zin Taylor

‘Foto

Studio

Zig-Zag’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

4 December 2014 — 11 January 2015

From October to December 2014, Zin Taylor was invited for a residency at 21er Haus in Vienna. As an artist in residence there is an opportunity to distance oneself from the everyday life, to work freely and undisturbed in an empty studio while getting to know Vienna and its artists. The Canadian-born artist took advantage of this situation and built on it. Even though the production of art outside of studio situations, known as post-studio-practice since the 1960s, is more of the opposite of Taylor’s practice. And that, although he is attributable to conceptual art, which once coined this term.

Zin Taylor usually works with sculpture, text, drawings, collage, video and audio. His basic formal vocabulary is abstract and minimal: predominantly black and white, his works are often populated by dots and stripes. These dots and stripes are of course abstract, but just as abstract as signs can be.

Linguistics uses the terms signified and signifier, meaning something denoted and the word itself describing something. There is not necessarily a relation between the form of a term and its meaning, except habituality and a societal agreement on a reference. In this sende, Taylor uses his stripes and dots as a visualization of language and its performance, transforming abstract signs into symbols for communication. So his initial question is all about how objects translate ideas and how ideas can become manifest in objects.

Zin Taylor came to Vienna with this vocabulary in his hand baggage. And as you could expect from a conceptual artist, he conceived a project addressing the site – not the exhibition space though, but the situation of an empty residency studio. He started to draw and to produce objects using clay, wire and plaster. He reacted on the outcome of the initial production and created new objects – he let himself be guided by the material, tried to let it speak and generate forms out of it, just like in classical sculpting.

This time his work is all about the language of production – the form that takes on a life of its own via countless thoughts and enters into dialog with the artist. The artist calls the forms emerging this process “units”. “Units”, like Taylor states, “describe the translation of ideas about a subject into a form about a subject. Units are what exist in physical space after the thinking and abstracting settles into shape. They are a way of handling information. The insinuation is that a thing, like a narrative, is made of many units—like how letters are used to produce words, words are used to produce a sentence, and then a statement.“

The elements developed in the studio were finally arranged in various combinations and formations and photographed. The result are no objects that are ideas, but a narration revolving around the formation and entanglement of streams of thought – a photo series about the production of things like they are thought, not as they seem. As permanently negotiable subjects they are the protagonists of Zin Taylor’s tale about the language of form, and in this case a metanarration about the language of form an artist has to struggle with during his residency. 

Zin Taylor was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1978 and currently lives and works in Brussels. Taylor has presented solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America. Writing by Zin Taylor, and his artist books, have been published by Sternberg Press (Berlin), Bywater Bros. Editions (Port Colborne), Mousse Publishing (Milan), Karma (New York), and Artforum (New York).

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Salvatore Viviano

‘I never liked being in bed alone’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

4 February — 6 April 2015

Salvatore Viviano is always good for a surprise. His surprises are mostly performances, pictorial and sculptural objects, photographs and installations – or a mixture of all of it. At 21er Raum, the artist primarily reduced the space. Entering the space, visitors are facing a coral-colored wall with a little opening. Two images are hung on the other walls, a number was written on one, and a plush toy sits in a corner. The teddy wears a pullover with a print on it reading “Call Me Maybe” – a reference to a pop song by Carly Rae Jepsen and its music video, but also an invitation to give someone a ring. Whom to (maybe) call is left unclear, but a telephone number was written on the wall. 

The smaller of the two canvases shows an idealized flame, respectively the Tinder logo. That’s an app for smartphones  that playfully connects singles. A happy family in bed is on the second canvas. The faces of the advertisement photography are covered by Viviano’s own, who is now in bed with himself.

But then there is this opening in the wall. On its threshold is a kind request to put off one’s shoes. After entering, visitors can crawl under a relative low ceiling to another opening. Slipped through, one finds oneself on a huge bed. On it, there are pillows and blanket, a lot of books and a Walkman, a calendar and posters. Salvatore Viviano has settled in here, but not alone. We are all invited to use the bed – to take a hiatus and just hang out. And all of that not alone, but with others. Because the artist sees a bed not primarily as a private room but as a social space. And he of course wants to share this view with us.

So it’s all about human relations and the establishing of a situation enabling low-threshold interaction – like Tinder and similar apps do. In addition, the installation is a symbol of a modern melancholy and an homage to Viviano’s favorite piece of furniture. He even placed a bed in his One Work Gallery, right after it opened in May 2014: “Beds fascinate me, I love them! I think the bed is the best invention there is. A lot of things happen in bed. As an artist, a lot of ideas come up in bed, you sleep, eat, have sex. And it’s a comfortable place of retreat. Working in a gallery particularly means: waiting, sitting, calling, reading. I didn’t want to sit in front of a table all day. Furthermore, I have some back problems since a while. The bed was a logic answer. Sometimes I fall asleep, and wake up when the doorbell rings and someone comes in.”

Salvatore Viviano was born in Palermo in 1980 and lives and works in Vienna since 2008. Amongst others, he did performances and shows at Ve.Sch (Vienna, 2009), Pro Choice (Vienna, 2010), L’Ocean Licker (Vienna, 2011), 68 m2 (Copenhagen, 2011), Global Talks (Stockholm, 2012), Glockengasse 9 (Vienna, 2012), 21er Haus (2013), Albertina (2013), Limbo (Copenhagen, 2014) and Mauve (Vienna, 2014). Since May 2014, he is running the One Work Gallery at Vienna’s Getreidemarkt. When he was seven years old, he asked his mother to take him to the circus. She answered: “If they want to see you, they have to come!”

Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0

Rosa Rendl

‘What You Desire’

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

15 April 15 — 7 June 2015

‘Photos’ 

Austrian photographies from the 1930s until today

21er Haus, Vienna

30 January — 5 May 2013