Programme 2012

Baby, I lost my handshoes...

Reality Manifestos, or Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
A study of détournement as Art Forms
Exhibition: January 19 – March 3, 2012
Opening: January 18, 2012, 7 pm
Symposium: January 19-20, 2012
Finissage: March 3, 2012, 7 pm

Participants in the Exhibition: Marc Bauer, Sabina Baumann, Mareike Bernien & Kerstin Schroedinger, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Bogna Burska, Brice Dellsperger, Konstantinos Manolakis, Michele O’Marah, Cora Piantoni, Elodie Pong, “Schmale, Scheirl, Knebl Werke” (Toni Schmale, Hans Scheirl & Jakob Lena Knebl), Rebecca Ann Tess
With a performance at the opening by The Centre of Attention, and a sound performance and DJ set by DJ Sweatproducer (Anne Käthi Wehrli).
At the finissage on March 3, Hans Scheirl will give a public interview, at 7pm.
The exhibition and the symposium are curated by Dimitrina Sevova.

Ideology can only shatter to pieces on contact with radical subjectivity.
From: René Viénet, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

The project takes as its point of departure the “first entirely detourned film in the history of cinema”: Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) by René Viénet, which adapts a spectacular film to a radical critique of cultural hegemony. The French word détournement is employed here for stealing, derailing, appropriating, misusing, re-enacting, rather than the specific term of appropriation that has acquired a special aura in an art-historical context, following John Stezaker’s recognition that “appropriation is actually a misleading term, because it suggests mastery.” Comprised of an international group exhibition and a two-day symposium, the project develops in the field of inquiry and investigation of hijacking and ready-made in contemporary art in relation to the cinema industry, and the possible transmission of properties between them. It investigates the space and the confusion of the border between image and representation, and specially focuses on the ruins of representation, what are the possibilities for translation, and where the idea of original and copy is lost. It follows the social, political and aesthetic content created as a dialectic clash between invisible and visible, or shifts between the notions of production and consumption, reality and fiction, creating temporalities in-between, bringing together a diversity of art practices that offer singular tactics of speculative misuse, repetition, faithful mimicry and détournement of existing images, visual icons, narrative patterns – re-enacting, rewriting and translating them. The project serves as a platform for investigating the structure and institutions of commercial cinema in relation to the institutions of art and images and the process of projection both in the most mechanical sense as a cinema camera and projector and their similarity to the function of human perception, as well as how psychoanalysis looks at the same principles of projection in the subjective and social field, as in how we project our fears and desires onto others, and how the norms of the psycho-symbolic formation of race, class and sexuality are repetitively performed. The works on display investigate the machine of cinema with its narrative structures, mythologies, representations, reproducibility, looking more generally at how these structures, institutions and borders are created, how value is created, how truth is imposed by the symbolic and economic conditions of a speculative industry. If the artist disrupts the surface of cinema, is there a possibility for upholding the claim for the autonomy of art as an institution? Ultimately, the project is about the spectacle, and what possibilities we have for subverting it, waking the viewer’s gaze from its torpid contemplation while still getting jouissance from the images’ seductive power.

Public Theoretical Symposium
Museum Halls, WUK
January 19-20, 2012
Participants in the Symposium: Mareike Bernien & Kerstin Schroedinger, Brice Dellsperger, Eva Egermann, Maren Grimm, Esther Kempf, Lucie Kolb, Elke Krasny, Boyan Manchev, Işın Önol, Bernd Oppl, Małgorzata Radkiewicz, Dorothee Richter, Nicola Ruffo, Simone Schardt & Wolf Schmelter, Dimitrina Sevova.
And: artist talks by the participants in the exhibition

Afterimage: Intuition and Duration within the Space of Art
Exhibition: April 12 – June 2, 2012
Opening: April 11, 2012

Artists: Steffi Alte, Frank Altmann, Robert Dowling, Marita Fraser, Marcel Frey, Jan Kiefer, Alex Lawler, Alexandra Navratil, Janine Tobüren, Matthew Verdon
Curated by Alex Lawler and Frank Altmann

This exhibition maps the ways that 11 young European artists build physical, semiotic and cultural languages that lead in and out of contemporary notions of abstraction. Articulated within each of these spheres of abstraction is a relational world that is fundamentally literal and emphasizes a departure not from historical notions of figuration, but from historical non-objectivity.
This applied notion of abstract vision echoes Henri Bergson’s insistence of intuition over analysis and represents a position arising after an artist places themselves within the field of abstraction or inside the literalness of an object and turns back to face the world.
This exhibition posits that modes of perception and the mechanics of metaphysical vision serve as structural supports for abstraction in the same way as built structural supports in contemporary art culture. In this way, this group of artists reveal themselves through gestures that are both physically present and fundamentally conceptual.

COLLIDING WORLDS. Nodes of Mobility and Networks of Transient Communities
Exhibition: September 13 – October 25, 2012
Opening: September 12, 2012

Artists: Katharina Copony (AT), Josef Dabernig (AT), Michael Hieslmair & Michael Zinganel (AT), Carolin Hirschfeld & Clara Giacalone (DE), Jamshed Kholikov (TJ) (tbc), Heimo Lattner (AT/DE), Plinio Avila Marquez (DE/ MX), Christoph Oertli (CH), Adrian Paci (I) (tbc), Barthelemy Toguo (FR/US/CM), Ingo Vetter & Annette Weisser (DE), Anna Witt (AT/DE)
Curated by Michael Hieslmair

If our everyday is shaped by multilocality – cyclically recurring brief stays at different places and the travel in-between them – then stations and nodes increasingly become important liminoid sites of mobility. Wherever people enter, exit, or transfer, and mobility flows break down for whatever reason, worlds collide and breed multilocal (protagonist) networks of recurring temporary communities.
COLLIDING WORLDS brings together artists whose work investigates places and social systems of a highly globalised and internationally networked mobility culture and attempt, by way of example, to represent the connected consequences for the protagonists and how they use their environment. The contributions address changes in the socio-spatial reference systems on the microlevel, whereas on the macrolevel, they focus on the economic and political transformation processes that become effective in connection with a globalised movement of goods and people.

Baby, I lost my handshoes…
Exhibition: November 08 – December 22, 2012
Opening: November 07, 2012

The artists Donna Huanca, Vytautas Jurevicius, Lisa Meixner and Aki Nagasaka present
Baby, I Lost My Handshoes …, a group show combining installation, moving image, text,
and sculpture. With shared interest in the expression of social and cultural life, the artists
interpret the impact of form and style through playful narratives of architecture, fashion
and language. Their works make imaginative and stylised use of documentary, advertising,
scientific inquiry and ethnographic field work, and, much like the curiously named
Handshoes of the exhibitions title, their combination of works evidences a radial
creative/thought process, seemingly free from the rigid critical or ethical interpretations.

The exhibition will be accompanied by film screenings, lectures, performances and
discussions given by feature guests whose artistic, scientific or curatorial positions will
push the boundaries of the main exhibition creating a dynamic artistic dialogue during
Baby, I Lost My Handshoes… at Kunsthalle Exnergasse.