by
2023
Vienna
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Saturdays 12pm-4pm
12pm - 6pm
Wien, 1020 Vienna
Barnabas Bacsi is a con artist.
Taric Lallai is a CSS artist.
Dorotheergasse 12, 1010 Vienna
(USA, 1987)
(USA, 1961)
(Sweden, 1990)
(Bulgaria, 1977)
(Wales, 1983)
(Denmark, 1942)
(USA, 1975)
Play it as it lays is an exhibition that takes its name from Joan Didion’s 1972 novel about late twentieth century nihilism, a nihilism of surfeit and ennui. It is a revisitation upon the aftermath of the sixties, that great schism in culture, that sees not – or not only – youthful force, progressivism and unrepression, but confusion, restlessness, melancholy. An empty centre.
“Formalism,” the art critic Robert Hughes wrote in Time Magazine, also in 1972, “is a game not worth playing anymore.” The protagonist in Didion’s novel knows this, and yet she keeps going. She is the quintessential California character for a time when California became the metonym for something greater, graver, than itself: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, The Whole Earth.
Some questions follow to the one who sensed “the dream had ended and she had slept on”. Was Land Art the formal triumph over the horizon, or a witness to the smallness of humans, an attempt at anchor? What if what we see when gazing into a lava lamp, into ourselves, is not infinity but precisely its limit: nothing?
Getreidemarkt 14, 1010 Vienna
María Inés Plaza Lazo, born in 1989 in Guayaquil, Ecuador, learnt curatorial practice from artists: Curating as informal research, as extended artistic action, as intersectional class struggle and institutional critique. Her thinking was shaped academically through her studies of art history, philosophy and theatre studies at the LMU in Munich. She practices her anti-academic stance both within cultural institutions as a communications consultant and guest lecturer in various faculties of the humanities in international universities, colleges of art and design, as well as outside, as a publicist and editor-at-large of the multilingual street newspaper for art and culture, wealth and poverty, called Arts of the Working Class. She lives and works between Düsseldorf, Berlin and the streets of the world.
Parkring 4, 1010 Vienna
Luca Lo Pinto is the artistic director of MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. From 2014 until 2019 he worked as curator of Kunsthalle Wien. He is the co-founder of the magazine and publishing house NERO. He produced a range of solo exhibitions with artists including Emilio Prini, Simone Forti, Nathalie du Pasquier, Jason Dodge, Tony Cokes, Friedl Kubelka, Cinzia Ruggeri, Camille Henrot, Olaf Nicolai, Pierre Bismuth, Babette Mangolte, Lawrence Weiner, Gelatin & Liam Gillick, Charlemagne Palestine, Lisa Ponti, Darren Bader as well as publications with Mario Garcia Torres and Mario Diacono. In 2012 he edited the book 'Documenta 1955-2012. The endless story of two lovers'. Furthermore, he has been a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and magazines (Flash Art, Kaleidoscope, Mousse, Purple, Spike, Rolling Stone).
Chiara Siravo is a curator and researcher based in Rome. She is part of the curatorial collective ‘LOCALES‘ and is currently teaching at NABA — Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Until February 2024 she was part of the curatorial department at MACRO — Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome for three years where she coordinated a number of exhibitions and curated shows by BLESS and Pauline Curnier Jardin, as well as worked on a number of publications including the first edition and Italian translation of Reba Maybury’s 'Faster Than An Erection'. From 2021 until 2023 she was part of the team of curators working on the theme of archiving at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and between 2017 and 2020 she was associate curator of I-DEA, an exhibition project for Matera European Capital of Culture 2019. She holds an MA in the History of Material Culture and Design from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Her writing has appeared in 032C and Umbau. She is editor of a series of books published by Humboldt on the archives of Basilicata and her first published piece of writing was an essay on the geographies of hell printed in 'Pictures of Hell' by Mark Ruwedel.
The exhibition OTHERWHEN, curated by Luca Lo Pinto and Chiara Siravo, presents works by artists Gianna Surangkanjanajai (b. 1991), Giuseppe Desiato (b. 1935) and the independent fashion brand CORMIO (since 1990). Spanning generations, geographies and mediums, the group exhibition is a collapsed time capsule, a day in the living archive of the syncretic, opaque and dis-articulate present we inhabit, in which nothing is what it sounds like. The overall suggestion is that each work exists spatially, temporally and culturally outside of its own material boundaries, like a stream that would like to burst, but can only do so metaphorically.
Elisabethstraße 4, 1010 Vienna
Jen Kratochvil (born 1986, Czech Republic) is a curator and educator based in Prague. He graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and currently teaches at the Photography Department of the Film Academy in Prague. Kratochvil served as the director of Kunsthalle Bratislava until its recent closure by a new nationalist Slovak government. He was co-founder of Significant Other, a curatorial platform located in Vienna, operating within the larger Central European region, concerned with the overlaps of architecture and urbanism with art. Previously, Kratochvil worked as a freelance curator in collaboration with various institutions, such as Galerie Rudolfinum and the National Gallery Prague, independent spaces, and private galleries. His long-term research explores various forms of identity de/construction in Eastern Europe through artistic practices and institutional engagement and critique. His curatorial practice primarily focuses on time-based and lens-based media, with special attention to architecture, technology, and the potential of queer resistance amid a collectively experienced conservative turn within the region.
tba
Werdertorgasse 4/2/13, 1010 Vienna
Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator and curatorial department head at Dia Art Foundation, where she most recently organized projects with Charles Atlas, An-My Lê, Tiffany Sia, Cheyney Thompson, and Meg Webster. Prior to Dia, she taught art and architecture history at The Graduate Center, Hunter College, and City College, New York, and worked at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Matilde has authored several publications, most recently Mika Tajima: Energetics (2024), Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings (2023), and Olga Balema: Computer (2021). Her upcoming projects include exhibitions and live programs with Duane Linklater, Alan Michelson, Paul Pfeiffer, Cameron Rowland, and Martine Syms, and an artist book with Senga Nengudi.
Wassergasse 14, 1030 Vienna
Eschenbachgasse 11, 1010 Vienna
Nilbar Güreş, 1977 born in Istanbul (TR), lives and works in Vienna (AT), Naples (IT) and Istanbul (TR).
Devin T. Mays, 1985 born in Detroit (US), lives and works in Chicago (US).
Martha Rosler, 1943 born in Brooklyn, New York (US), lives and works in Brooklyn, New York (US).
Roman Signer, 1938 born in Appenzell (CH), lives and works in St. Gallen (CH).
Fredrik Værslev, 1979 born in Moss (NO), lives and works in Drøbak (NO).
Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Vienna
Bora Baboçi (1988) lives and works in Tirana, Albania.
Nona Inescu (1991) lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Bucharest, Romania.
Damir Očko (1977) lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
Tanja Ostojić (1972) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Neša Paripović (1942) lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia.
Duba Sambolec (1949) lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Tevž Logar (1979) works as an independent curator, editor and author who collaborated with various institutions, galleries, and collections, such as: Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Kunsthalle Praha; TBA21, Vienna; the Venice Biennial and many others. He lives in Rijeka, Croatia.
In the realm of the official narratives of art history the body, as a space that ‘archives’ social, political, cultural, and personal traces, often served as a powerful medium for revealing stories that have been historically marginalised or repressed. On the other hand today, the body holds significant importance in contemporary society, serving as a central focus in numerous tangible cultural, social, and political discourses in relation to the questions of gender identity, technology, labour, health, environment and migration. It is through the lens of this relationship, and in the context of the conceptual framework of this year’s Curated by festival, Untold Narratives, that informs the approach of the exhibition In the Mood for Interruption at Galerie Kandlhofer, through the body itself. The exhibited works offer multiple perspectives that can help us to understand more deeply its profound importance in shaping and reflecting our everyday.
In contemporary society, the body is not just a biological entity but also a complex symbol of identity, agency and experience. Its significance permeates various aspects of life, reflecting broader cultural, social, and political dynamics. In the context of contemporary art, we can uncover a multitude of repressed narratives that challenge dominant discourses and offer new perspectives on identity, power, and representation. On a subtle level this can be recognised in the work of Bora Baboçi (b. 1988), whose work directly tackles the boundaries between public and private by creating tactile, immersive experiences which show tangible connections between people, objects and their environments and how this impacts human behaviour, movement and social interaction. Undoubtedly, the tension between space and body, is something that can be also recognised in the series of historical works of Neša Paripović (b. 1942) who uses the urban landscape as a backdrop for his work where the city becomes a stage for his artistic intervention. In the case of Paripović we witness how the artist focuses on the body as a site of exploration and expression, and how personal identity is negotiated within different social contexts. The question of context is also a point of departure for the sculpture of Duba Sambolec (b. 1949) which refers to a long-lasting cultural treatment of female body as a living, warm entity waiting to be exposed, gazed at or consumed. Deliberately headless sculpture references the historic Western concept of a dual-human existence in which the head, associated with thinking and ideas, is seen as superior, while the rest of the body holds a lower and more problematic status in our cultural canon. Challenging of the traditional gender roles and stereotypes can be also associated to the work of Tanja Ostojić (b. 1972). In the series of exhibited photographic works Ostojić simultaneously explores how societal norms shape the construction and representation of female identity, whilst the work represents critical and engaged reaction to the socio-political context that strongly influenced the artist’s conditions of production. And it is exactly this critical thought that sometimes leads to the fact that certain bodies have been marginalised, objectified and excluded from mainstream narratives, as in the context of Damir Očko’s (b. 1977) collages, that frequently explore themes related to the human body and identity. The layering and juxtaposing of various materials, including photographs, drawings, text and found objects, evokes the complexity of bodily experiences and artists’ personal narratives. While not necessarily explicitly focused on gender, Očko’s work often engages with themes that indirectly address gender dynamics, such as vulnerability, power and the human condition. Dialogue about the body through various artistic positions and perspectives is concluded with the selection of objects and photographs by Nona Inescu (b. 1991) whose work reflect the various complex relationships that emerge between the human body, nature and culture. By merging elements of nature with human-made objects, Inescu not only creates thought-provoking works that encourage viewers to re-evaluate their relationship with the natural world, but also that showcase humanity’s co-existence with nature. Although Inescu’s poetic and sometimes even completely ephemeral gestures at the first glance seem stripped of any kind of agency, a more profound approach to artworks reveal that nature is portrayed as an equal subject to humanity rather than an object for exploitation.
The exhibition In the Mood for Interruption is a small step towards exploring unspoken narratives through the perspective of the body, which opens up new possibilities for better understanding, whilst stimulating critical thought leading to a more inclusive and equitable cultural landscape. By paying attention to these untold narratives, we can try to uncover hidden histories and voices that have been silenced by dominant power structures driven by special political, social and economic interests. In this way, the relationships between artworks and ideas act as a reminder that it is impossible to think of the body as an untold narrative unless it is anchored in personal experiences and agencies that are not isolated from the broader political landscape. But this can not exist without uncompromising dedication. Something that can be felt as a beautiful, unstoppable tension between Chow Mo-Wan and Su Li-Zhen in Wong Kar-Wai’s classic In the Mood for Love, whose deep and undeniable connection and dedication to their principles lead to haunting poignancy and enduring resonance for a certain cause. But when considering the present exhibition, In the Mood for Interpretation, the cause, unlike it’s cinematographic etymon, shouldn’t be about the sense of duty and respect for societal norms or the established narratives, but rather for their interruption.
Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna
Dr. Friedemann Malsch (*1955) Studied Art History, History, French, Sociology and Urbanistics in Freiburg, Bonn and Paris. Free-lance curator and critic based in Cologne 1983 -93. Curator for Contemporary Art at Museum in Strasburg 1993-6. 1996 Founding Director of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, and its director until 2021.
Schottenfeldgasse 45, 1070 Vienna
Born 1978, lives and works in France
Mohamed Bourouissa was born in 1978 in Blida, Algeria, and currently lives and works in Gennevilliers, France. Each of Mohamed Bourouissa's projects, preceded by a lengthy immersion phase, constructs a new situation of enunciation. Contrary to falsely simplistic media constructions, the artist reintroduces complexity into the representation of the margins of hyper-visibility.
His work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad, at Palais de Tokyo in 2024, the Lam - Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut à Villeneuve d’Ascq, the Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, basis in Frankfurt, the BAL in Paris, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the FRAC Franche-Comté in Besançon. He has participated in the Biennials of Sharjah, Havana, Lyon, Venice, Algiers, Liverpool, and Berlin, as well as the Milan Triennial. In 2018, he was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet photography prize. In 2020, he won the Deutsche Boerse Photography Foundation Prize following the exhibition "Libre échange" presented at Monoprix d'Arles as part of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie. In 2024, he was a finalist for the Mario Merz Prize. His works are held in prominent collections including those of MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou and the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
In 2022, he won the Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation Photobook Prize with Loose Joints editions for the book "Périphérique."
Born in England in 1917, Leonora Carrington arrived in Mexico in 1942 escaping World War II. Today, she is recognized as one of the most important and influential women artists of the 20th century. For over seven decades, Carrington's creative process was fueled by a magical and extraordinary world, often paired with a rebellious spirit that would define her life and practice. Leonora Carrington stands until today as a captivating and enigmatic figure of the surrealist art movement. Her fantastical ideas are carried across her preferred mediums of painting, sculpture, and writing and stand as a testament to her distinctive vision for an unapologetic and free-thinking exploration of the subconscious. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including hybrid animals, landscapes and fictive characters), feminism, ecology and the mystical of Carrington's oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of challenging conventions, memory, fantasy, and freedom.
Carrington’s artistic compositions were deeply intertwined with her tumultuous life experiences. Fleeing the family expectations imposed on her as a young society woman of early 20th-century England, Carrington forged her independent path within the surrealist movement in France, an influence she carried with her to Mexico. Much like her peers, she delved into the subconscious recesses of her mind, creating dreamlike narratives that echo her struggles and triumphs. Her art became a vessel for introspection and independence, a medium through which she navigated the complexities of identity, mythology and the arcane.
Her work is found in renowned museum collections in the Americas, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, Tate Modern & Tate Britain in London, Museo National de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico City, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, among other prestigious institutions.
Throughout her career, Leonora Carrington has featured in influential international exhibitions, notably at the MOMA and Guggenheim in NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cultural Art in the US, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca US, Tate Liverpool, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City and more.
Born in 1996, lives and works in France
The illustrator, painter, and storyteller Neïla Czermak Ichti, known on Instagram as @alienhabibti, is a graduate of the Fine Arts School in Marseille. The characters in her work may well have alien horns or mermaid-like scales, but their family resemblance is striking. The artist’s features are copied from one face to another, while mothers, aunts, and grandmothers are transformed into avatars. Seamlessly and in the most natural way possible, they all fuse into a syncretic style borrowed from manga, anime, and video games.
This fierce and fantastic procession of characters is conjured up by Czermak Ichti with the tip of a biro – her preferred medium – and sometimes enhanced with acrylic paint. In her works, the monstrous becomes something else: a story of transmission and transition, as well as a sign of recognition. The stroke of her pen is as sharp as a Sphinx’s claw, a hybrid being as impossible to categorize as she herself, or the smiling or weeping kaomoji [Japanese emoji], a creature with a defined chest and a mocking sneer on its lips, as in her recent work Chienne de vie (2022).
1902, Cuba - 1982, France
“My painting is an act of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.”
Wifredo Lam
A pivotal figure of Latin American modern art, Wifredo Lam was born in 1902 in Cuba, the son of a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother of Spanish descent. After graduating from Havana’s Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, he won a scholarship in 1923 to study at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where he stayed until 1938, when he moved to Paris. There he was enthusiastically embraced by the city’s avant-garde, whose members at the time were fascinated with the unconscious, the fantastic, and the non-European cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. As a Caribbean of African descent, Lam held a particular appeal for these artists and poets (especially Pablo Picasso and André Breton), who perceived his race as playing a distinctive role in his work. In 1940, after the Nazis had occupied Paris, Lam escaped via cargo ship for an arduous journey back to Cuba. The voyage included a layover in the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where he met the poet Aimé Césaire, a founder of the Négritude movement, whose ideas would have an enduring influence on the artist. Back in Cuba after this long absence, Lam was confronted with the harsh reality of a country struggling to emerge from over 400 years of colonial subjugation. Disturbed by the island’s condition, Lam found motivation in his empathy with the dispossessed: “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly exploring the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks.” La jungla (The Jungle), made two years after his return to Cuba, is a monumental drawing of life-size figures in a sugarcane field, a location invested with the island’s history of slavery. Embracing the influence of Cubism, Lam depicts these characters multi-perspectivally and gives them stylized masks, referring not only to the masks in, say, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) but also to the idols of Afro-Cuban mysticism. Lam used water-based gouache to compose the scene in translucent layers. The figures stand camouflaged amid the dense bamboo and sugarcane; their totemic forms, simultaneously voluptuous and angular, gesture provocatively in a mysterious scene evoking “*lo real maravilloso*” (the marvelous real), a term coined by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier to describe the genuinely surreal nature of everyday life in the Caribbean.
In Lam’s jungle, the exuberance of nature, and the imperturbable expressions of the masks, are interrupted by the alarming presence of sharp blades and beaks in the sugarcane. These menacing presences insinuate that other dangers may lie hidden beneath the jungle’s skin. A landmark in Lam’s oeuvre, La jungla was included in a solo exhibition at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1944. There it caught the eye of James Johnson Sweeney, MoMA’s director of painting and sculpture, who successfully proposed the work for purchase to the Inter-American Fund, recently endowed by Nelson Rockefeller to strengthen the Museum’s Latin American holdings. Although Lam was absent from MoMA’s 1944 survey Modern Cuban Painters (following a dispute with the Cuban critic José Gómez Sicre, one of the show’s organizers), La jungla went on view in the Museum’s collection galleries immediately after its acquisition, in June 1945, and has been often on display since. Lam left Europe having experienced firsthand the vitality of Cubism, the emergence of Surrealism, and modern art’s fascination with African art. At home in Cuba, he developed a style that allowed him to express the hybrid quality of Cuban identity, fully asserting the African elements of its history in the language of modernist painting. In works such as La jungla, Lam reintegrated African art forms into an autochthonous context, challenging the Western construction of “the primitive” while still acknowledging the reality of Cuba’s colonial legacy.
Mohamed Bourouissa is visual artist and photographer born in 1978 in Blida, Algeria living and working in Gennevilliers, France. Each of Mohamed Bourouissa's projects is preceded by a lengthy immersion phase and constructs a new situation of enunciation. Contrary to falsely simplistic media constructions, the artist reintroduces complexity in contemporary society’s representations.
Für die Ausstellung in der Galerie Krinzinger in Wien schlägt der Kurator Mohamed Bourouissa einen unerwarteten Ansatz zum Teilen von Geschichten vor. Ist es möglich, die Unendlichkeit in einer Skizze zu erfassen? Erlaubt ihm diese Ausstellung mit dem Titel The Language of Chimeras, eine Vision zu artikulieren, die auf neuen Werten oder neuen Chimären basiert?
Die Gegenüberstellung der Künstler Wifredo Lam, Mohamed Bourouissa, Leonora Carrington und Neïla Czemak Ichti ermöglicht es uns, den Begriff der globalen Instabilität zu erfassen. Wie könnte man übersehen, dass diese neuen Verbindungen eine Umkehrung der Bedeutung bewirken?
Mohamed Bourouissa erklärt, dass seine Entscheidung, das Gedicht von Aimé Césaire mit der Hand auf die Wände der Galerie zu schreiben, um die Zeichnungen von Lam zu begleiten, die Bedeutung des Konzepts der Sprache zeigt. Es ist ein Weg, um mit dem Künstler und dem Dichter in Gemeinschaft und Komplizenschaft zu treten.
Denn ein Dichter repräsentiert vor allem die menschliche Natur in ihrer reinsten Form. Tief in der Sprache verwurzelt, transzendieren Dichter die menschliche Natur. Mohamed Bourouissa war immer Teil des Hier und Jetzt. Er ist ein Mensch der ewigen Gegenwart. Er ist sowohl ein Fremder als auch ein Einheimischer desselben Landes und derselben Sprache wie die oben genannten Künstler. Für ihn ist die Kunst in gewisser Form eine Muttersprache.
Einige Auszüge aus Zitaten helfen, die vielen Wege und Irrgärten zu verstehen, die er auf dieser Reise vorschlägt:
„Sprache ist etwas, das wir teilen, etwas, von dem wir manchmal denken, dass es uns entgeht oder dass wir es nur bruchstückhaft verstehen, aber es ist auch etwas, das zu uns gehört und von Grund auf vielfältig ist. Sprache ist etwas, das geschaffen wird, etwas, das lebt und Zwischenräume erzeugt, wie andere poetische Artikulationen. Das Gedicht von Césaire vereint all diese Aspekte in sich und beschwört demütig Lams Universum herauf. Es ist von Schönheit durchdrungen, aber auch von einer gewissen latenten Gewalt. Césaires Wahrnehmung seiner Begegnung mit Lam und deren Auswirkungen erzählt uns von einer fantastischen Welt, einer Welt der Geister, der Schimären, aber auch einer Welt der Zärtlichkeit. Eine Sprache der vielen Welten“. Bourouissa evoziert damit diese chimärenhaften Welten, die dem Werk von Lam innewohnen und die auch in den fantastischen Zeichnungen und Gemälden von Neïla Czermak Ichti und Leonora Carrington zu finden sind.
In seinem Video Island, dem Ausgangspunkt des Projekts, erinnert sich Bourouissa an seine Zusammenarbeit mit Estrella Diaz in Bezug auf den Film Soy Cuba (1964) und bittet sie, Beobachtungen ihrer Studenten vor Ort sowie die Erinnerungen einer der Darstellerinnen und des Drehbuchautors des Films zu sammeln. Das Ziel dieses Projekts war es, eine Gegengeschichte zu Soy Cuba und seiner Entstehung zu entwerfen. Anhand eines Zeichentrickfilms zeigt das Video, wie in Soy Cuba ein falsches Bild der kubanischen Revolution geschaffen wurde, ein Bild, das nicht dem entsprach, was die Kubaner erlebten und wie sie das Leben in ihrer Stadt empfanden. Sind diese Chimären eine Möglichkeit, über Gewalt zu sprechen oder ihr für einen Moment zu entfliehen, um zu versuchen, sie zu beschwören?
Der Begriff der Chimäre steht für diese Künstler für die Zwischenräume der Geschichte. Die von ihnen geschaffenen phantastischen Universen ermöglichen eine Welt, in der Gegengeschichten und das Unausgesprochene existieren und anerkannt werden. Mohamed Bourouissa ist als Entdecker in die Sprache der Kunst eingetreten: jedes Wort stand kurz vor der Geburt, die Ausdrücke waren Schöpfungen, die Adverbien waren immens ... Die Sätze wurden zu Kavalkaden, die durch ihre Energien Räume vor ihnen öffneten, und doch waren die alten Gespenster nicht verschwunden. Dieses Negativ der Wirklichkeit, diese Gegenrepräsentation der Wirklichkeit, drückt sich in den Überschneidungen von Film, Zeichnung, Poesie und Malerei sowie in der Vielfalt der Inspirationen aus.
In der Ausstellung spiegelt sich dies beispielsweise in den Arbeiten von Neïla Czermak Ichti wider, deren Figuren sich von Gore-, Grunge-, Science-Fiction- oder Manga-Kulturen inspirieren lassen und von diesen genährt werden, während sie gleichzeitig mit ihrer sehr konkreten Familie, ihrem intimen und alltäglichen Universum verbunden sind. Mohamed Bourouissa teilt mit, „dass er von Neïla Czermak Ichtis Nachforschungen über den vergessenen nigerianischen Schauspieler Bolaji Badejo, der 1986 die Figur des Alien (im Film Aliens von James Cameron) spielte, und von ihrem breiteren Interesse an der Figur des Alien in ihrer Beziehung zum Anderssein und zum ‚Anderen‘ beeinflusst wurde. Diese Forschung steht im Einklang mit dem fantastischen und mystischen Aspekt von Carringtons Werk und ihrer Verschmelzung von menschlichen und tierischen Figuren. Auch Carrington entwirft eine Vision der Chimäre als zusammengesetzte Figur, die über die Seele spricht, wie zum Beispiel ihre Vogelfrau, die das Porträt eines Verstorbenen ist, zeigt. Ihre Kunst schafft Verbindungen zwischen Dingen, Zeitlichkeiten und Realitäten. Die Ausstellung ist auch eine Reflexion über die Exilwege von Wifredo Lam und Leonora Carrington im 20. Jahrhundert und ihre künstlerischen Wanderungen: Carrington war eine Europäerin, die sich in Mexiko niederließ, und Lam war eine Kubanerin, die sich in Paris niederließ. Die Ausstellung will aufzeigen, wie diese Ortswechsel ihre Arbeit befruchteten und es ihnen ermöglichten, ihre Universen zu entwickeln“.
„Was diese Künstler verbindet, ist der Aspekt, von oder über ein Gebiet zu arbeiten, das nicht das eigene ist. In gewisser Weise war es diese Bedingung, der ich mich näherte, indem ich mich für Kuba und seine Geschichte interessierte, als ich den Film Island schuf“, erklärt Bourouissa.
Neïla Czermak Ichti spricht von einem Ort, der mir sehr vertraut, intim und manchmal autobiografisch erscheint. Es ist jedoch ein Ort, an dem das Fantastische auftaucht, um das Gefühl der Nähe zu vermitteln und zu transformieren. Diese beunruhigenden Erlebnisse - wenn die Haare der Personen, die an einem Familienessen teilnehmen, zu Berge stehen, wenn ein Falke mit menschlichem Kopf über den Menschen auftaucht, die sich auf einem Sofa umarmen - sind zeitliche und räumliche Abenteuer. Es gelingt ihr, uns in ihrem Netz zu fangen.
Schließlich gehen wir der Frage nach Ritualen nach, die sich im Laufe unseres Lebens ereignen. Die Verkündigung wird zum Vorboten von etwas, das bald geschehen wird (Lam/Césaire), verwandelt sich in Kindheitserinnerungen, in Geburt und Tod (Czemak Ichti), in bestimmte Inkarnationen und Symbole von Mutterschaft und Weiblichkeit (Carrington) oder in das kollektive Gedächtnis eines Films (Island) - all das bildet eine bestimmte Konstellation von Momenten, die unser Leben durchziehen - eine Art, uns auf einen Weg einzulassen, der immer vor uns liegt.
Mohamed Bourouissa, Sébastien Delot und Margot Nguyen
Eschenbachgasse 9, 1010 Vienna
born 1943 in Los Angeles, California.
The main forces of David Deutsch paintings are constraint, solitude, and disintegration. Themes which echo the existentialism in the work of Samuel Beckett, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon. All four artists are engaged in defining the borders between a theatrical performance of a play, of a sculpture or of a painting and a purely visual representation.
These themes constitute the affinities between the four artists who crafted works in drastically different ways yet shared strikingly similar concerns about the limits of representation and art’s inherent failure to create transcendent meaning.They also embody aesthetic and theoretical affinities that all four artist share: the fragility of human existence. Bodies are no longer a guarantee of a certain consistency of subjective experience; they are instead just as unstable as consciousness itself.
Deutsch, like Beckett, Giacometti and Bacon, draws attention to the repeated use of cages, to rethink the status of bodies in space. Deutsch is preoccupied with these questions, and the use of cages in his paintings, in form of a web of grids, a house, a car or as in his latest paintings for the exhibition at Krobath Gallery in form of an opera stage. These cages are framing the stage - a frame that doesn’t disappear in the representation but rather stands out from it, drawing attention to the limits of that representation. This point is particularly interesting because for Beckett, Giacometti, Bacond and for David Deutsch, the possibility of existential freedom, or a subject who freely chooses to make meaning in a meaningless world, is gone. Faced with this impossibility of making meaning, a viable alternative is play—the staging of meaning that uses materiality itself to draw attention to its own performance. The stage for David Deutsch is the field of a canvas; it is the ground and its own limit for his performative paintings, which feeds on repetition and speed. The omnipresent frame or cage where one or two or even three figures are positioned, could be perceived as symbol of social repression and the impossibilities to communicate and make sense of our lives. This form leads Deutsch to consider with ever greater attentiveness the sensations of a painting, its fast rhythm of brushstrokes, the excessive use of the color brown and the idea that a painting might mediate our darkest, most uninhibited urges.
Perhaps the most famous artwork we can relate to David Deutsch’s preoccupation is Giacometti’s sculpture “the place at 4am’, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Giacometti worked on it during the summer of 1932. Each night he built a palace from pieces of wood the size of thin chopsticks and by the end of the night he let it collapse to then rebuild it in the following night. By Autumn, he knew the form this palace should take, and proceeded to execute the final version of it, all in a single night. The ‘palace’ he ended up with had no roof and no walls. Like the dream of transparency pursued by modernist architects, one can see almost the entire career of Francis Bacon coming out of this image.
The connection made between Giacometti's sculptures and Deutsch’s paintings will allow us to tackle the major themes that bring them together: the importance of the creative process experienced between repetition and disappointment, their mutual interest in a body that is both a medium and a constrain, the importance of scenography, the dislocation of body and speech, solitude, and a sense of the absurd. Giacometti and Deutsch, like Bacon and Beckett, are articulating psychological aspects of both human condition and states of mind. Their figures, in the case of David Deutsch on the verge of abstraction, are representations or rather expressions of uncompromising interest in melancholy, sexuality, excess and the relevance of painting today.
Singerstraße 27, 1010 Vienna
Please contact the gallery for assistance.
We often think of artists as having a singular voice, internal, intentional and considered. We also recognize that artists can occupy multiple positions and draw from outside influences often intuitively, incorporating the expressions of previous generations of artists in the flow of contemporary practice. The challenge in an exhibition like this, and maybe in any exhibition, is to create a situation in which the actions of different generations of artists reveal a shared understanding of their common insight into the essential nature of the art as well as its distinguishing character. Through their work, artists often convey particular emotions that are drawn from the details of their situation, addressing the qualities of their time and place and helping to define it. This shared drive to reflect a true representation of lived experience seems continuous from generation to generation and exists in part as recognition that even when things feel incongruous there is also an unbroken sense of a common aspiration present over time. For example, in Lisa DeAbreu’s work we sense a search and longing for what is missing in a family’s and culture’s history that may never be fully reconciled but may be represented. In the same room as DeuAbreu’s Forgotten & Foreseen, 2024, Stephen Parrino’s Freudin Flop,1987, and Hirsch Perlman’s Accidence (5),1989, represent absence literally and rhetorically in ways that imply that absence is essential to the whole of our understanding, exemplifying how generations of artists often touch on like themes in different ways.
Schleifmühlgasse 5, 1040 Vienna
* 1985, lives and works in London
*1985, lives and works in Sikkim, New Delhi and Goa
*1973, lives and works in Vienna
*1995, lives and works in Prague
*1992, lives and works in Oslo
*1974, lives and works in London
*1938 †1976, lived and worked in Florence
lives and works in Berlin
*1988, lives and works in Barcelona
*1983, lives and works in Vienna
Kate Sutton is a writer based in Zagreb, Croatia, after nearly a decade in Russia, where she helped found the non-profit art space Baibakov Art Projects. As a curator, she helped bring artists like Paul Pfeiffer, Cyprien Gaillard, Latifa Echakhch, Wade Guyton, and Luc Tuymans to Moscow, while also showcasing Russian artists including Ira Korina, Olga Chernysheva, and Valery Chtak. A recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Art Writers Grant for short-form criticism, she has written for magazines including Artforum, Bookforum, Bidoun, Frieze, Ibraaz, and LEAP, and penned catalogue essays for artists including Emilija Škarnulytė, Nilbar Güreş, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Monica Bonvicini, Dorian Gaudin, Basim Magdy, Stefan Sava, and Martin Roth. From 2018 until October 2023, she served as the international editor for Artforum, where she helped the magazine to expand its representation and take on new voices. For 2019-2020, she was a resident professor of the WHW Akademija, in collaboration with David Maljković and is currently a resident professor for the program’s 2024 edition. She is also currently overseeing publications and communications for Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale and serving as managing editor for Sanja Iveković’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné.
Eschenbachgasse 9, 1010 Vienna
Agnes Scherer (born in 1985, Germany) lives and works in Salzburg and Berlin. She studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with Peter Doig and Enrico David.
Scherer’s work develops unique forms of presentation which bring together paintings and handmade artifacts, generating large-scale and holistic installations. Scherer thus creates complex pictorial work that resists immediate objectification and commodification, instead demanding from viewers a heightened level of focus and engagement. Throughout her artistic practice, she interrogates power relations and their underlying psychologies. Drawing from analyses of art history, anthropology, and cultural history, Scherer subverts artistic strategies that originally served the consolidation of power. Using anachronisms and representation of universally known symbols, her work often illustrates the uncanny ways in which historical systems, economies, and societal roles are reflected in the present.
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Selected solo shows include 'Woe and Awe' at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); 'Savoir Vivre' at ChertLüdde, Berlin (2024); 'Ein seltsames Spiel' at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2023); 'Casper a la mode', PAGE (NYC) at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2023); 'Savoir Vivre' at Heidelberger Kunstverein (2023); 'A thousand times yes' at Sans titre, Paris (2022); 'Fancies' at PAGE (NYC), New York (2022); 'The Notebook Simulations' at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2021); 'My refuge, my treasure, without body, without measure' at ChertLüdde, Berlin (2021); 'Coeurs Simples' at Sans titre, Paris (2020); 'ORLANDO TUSSAUD' at Philipp Haverkampf, Berlin (2019).
Agnes Scherer's first operetta "Cupid and the Animals", was awarded the Nigel Greenwood Art Prize in 2015 and performed in, among other places, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2017) and TRAMPS in New York (2018). In 2019, her second elaborate work within this format, "The Teacher", was presented by Kinderhook & Caracas in Berlin, at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2020) and recently in Italy for the festival ART CITY Bologna (2023). Also in 2020, Scherer presented the first part of her third operetta project "The Salty Testament" at 1646 in The Hague. The artist’s narrative installation "The Very Hungry" at the Berlin project space Horse & Pony was granted the Berlin Art Prize (2019).
Agnes Scherer’s works are featured in the permanent collections of important institutions and museums, including FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Sigg Art Foundation; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; KOLUMBA Museum, Cologne and Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimünster in Aachen.
In her exhibitions and stage productions, Salzburg-based artist Agnes Scherer merges sculpture, painting, drawing, music, and performance to create multilayered object theatres. For "Curated by: Untold Narratives," she revisits the 'archive' of her own artistic practice to expand and recontextualize a piece about Marie Antoinette originally created in 2019. This scenographic installation, composed of painterly and sculptural elements, uses events from
the life of the iconic French queen as a pretext to explore the ongoing revival of feudal structures. Scherer portrays Marie Antoinette both at the guillotine and amidst her yearning for a pastoral life. Her paintings feature the „Hameau de la Reine“, a fully functional farm village, recently restored by Dior, which the queen had constructed in the gardens of Versailles in 1783 to playfully explore a rustic lifestyle together with selected guests.
In contrast to glorifying perspectives on the French Revolution, "Strawfires" offers an ambiguous portrait of these events. The title refers on the one hand to the recurring overwriting of revolutionary agendas by neo-feudal demands for power, privilege, and profit maximization, which extends into the present day. On the other hand, the title refers to a socially romantic desire for a fairer existence within the broader societal context, a desire that is only casually flirted with through the facades of simple lifestyles, detox rituals, or regular retreats to remote 'cabins' for mental and physical cleansing.
Lichtenfelsgasse 5/2, 1010 Vienna
John Giorno (1936–2019, born and died New York City) was a versatile artist celebrated for his poetry performance and activism. Giorno gained attention for his politically charged Dial-A-Poem project. In 1965, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit organization to support other artists, poets, and musicians, which produced events and festivals, operated a record label, and provided grants to help with AIDS-related costs. Giorno's work extended into various media, collaborating with artists and filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and his partner Ugo Rondinone. He practiced Buddhism for most of his life, within the Nyingma lineage, and retired from performing in 2017 to focus on meditation, art, and writing his memoirs. His lasting legacy encompasses his artistic contributions as well as Giorno Poetry Systems, which continues to operate today and invites artists, poets, and musicians to reflect on the work of other artists, poets, and musicians. Dial-A-Poem was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1970 and has since been exhibited in galleries around the world. In 2015/2016, the exhibition Ugo Rondinone: I Love John Giorno, curated by Ugo Rondinone, took place at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Giorno’s books of poetry include: Poems of John Giorno, New York: Mother Press, 1967; Johnny Guitar, New York: Angel Hair Books (now Artist Books), 1969; Balling Buddha, New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1970; Birds, New York: Angel Hair Books (now United Artist Books), 1971; Cancer in My Left Ball: Poems, 1970-1972, New York: Something Else Press, 1973; Shit, Piss, Blood & Brains, New York: The Painted Bride Press, 1977; Grasping At Emptiness, New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1985; You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings, New York: Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd, 1993; and Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007, New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008.
Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) is a New York-based nonprofit organization that supports artists, poets, and musicians, founded in 1965 by artist John Giorno (1936 – 2019). An influential artist, activist, and poet, Giorno was recognized for creating new spaces for poetry, pushing it off the page and into the visual, musical, political, and social spheres. GPS’s director Anthony Huberman invited Krist Gruijthuijsen to co-curate the exhibition.
Huberman comes to GPS after a decade directing the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, and brings a wealth of experience to give GPS a renewed sense of purpose, with a commitment to supporting a new generation of artists, poets, and musicians. Headquartered in downtown Manhattan at 222 Bowery, in an iconic landmarked building that once provided a home or studio to Mark Rothko, Lynda Benglis, John Giorno, and William Burroughs, GPS programs include artist-curated programming, a record label with music and spoken word, a grant program supporting the LGBTQ+ community, and an expanding series of phone numbers that extend the reach of Giorno's iconic Dial-A-Poem. At the core of GPS is the artist's perspective: artists, poets, and musicians curate the events, they select tracks for the record label, they jury the grants, and their voices are heard on each of the Dial-A-Poem phone lines. Its founding principle is peer-to-peer support, where a diverse range of artists show up for each other, support each other, learn from each other, and collaborate with each other—and where an audience can see the world from an artist’s point of view.
Gruijthuijsen’s former tenure at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin has been marked by visionary curation and international collaboration, positioning the institute at the forefront of contemporary discourse. His extensive network and curatorial expertise solidified KW's status as a hub for artistic expression.
As two of the most prominent figures in contemporary art leadership and poised to shape the trajectory of their respective institutions, Huberman and Gruijthuijsen exemplify a commitment to fostering dialogue and collaboration within the artistic community.
September 13 – October 19, 2024
Talk with Krist Gruijthuijsen, Anthony Huberman, moderated by Barbara Casavecchia, Editor-in-Chief, Mousse
Magazine, Thursday, September 12, 2024, 6.30 – 7.30 pm
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present God Complex, the gallery's second solo exhibition with the late US-American artist and poet John Giorno (1936-2019). The exhibition is organized by Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) and curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Anthony Huberman. GPS is a New York-based nonprofit organization that supports artists, poets, and musicians, founded in 1965 by Giorno, who was known for creating new spaces for poetry, pushing it off the page and into the visual, musical, political, and social spheres. Huberman, the director of GPS, invited Gruijthuijsen to co-curate the exhibition, and in lieu of a press release, both curators wrote a letter to John.
Berlin, May 22, 2024
Dear John,
Blame it on Anthony! He wanted me to curate a show of your work. And what did I come up with? Right, a show about the big E-G-O. I titled it God Complex, paradoxically given your life-long devotion to Buddhism. However, the show does embody the spirit of Buddhism by presenting the joys & doubts of life and our micro-macro relationship to materiality and immateriality, whatever that means. But before I dive into the supposed meaning of this show, I have some confessions to make.
Unfortunately, we never met in person, John, but every morning I wake up and see your work, I want to cum in your heart. It was 2018 and I fell desperately in love with a man. For a brief moment, that love was reciprocated, only to be reconsidered seconds later. Have you ever heard of ghosting? Basically, it's an easy way out to avoid any form of confrontation. Slide to the left and move on, so to speak. I was devastated, heartbroken, and wept for weeks. Why in God's (yes, God's) name did this hit me so hard? The week after I was invited to participate in a panel on "cancel culture" (pun intended, I guess), I dragged myself out of bed and attended. During the rather uninspiring event (just cancel panel discussions as a format, period), I kept staring at your piece hanging on one of the gallery walls. It was the perfect embodiment of my feelings at the time, and maybe even of me as an emotionally and sexually driven person. I went to the gallerist and bought it.
Did I mention that I used to be an artist? When I read hurricane in a drop of cum, I thought of one of the pieces I presented in my graduation show at the sculpture department of the Maastricht Art Academy, which was simply a dirty towel titled Millions of Lives Lost. When I told the committee that the towel contained me and my lover’s semen from the past year, their faces cringed. See how self-absorbed I am?
I went to the infamous 222 Bowery. Anthony showed me around and we even happened to see the space that used to be Rothko's studio. The place reeks of history! We visited your apartment, which felt very peaceful and very you, at least the you I imagined. We went to the Bunker and visited Burroughs' bedroom, which, not surprisingly, was a dark experience. I had no idea the man was so obsessed with guns! I laughed when I read your memoir describing the sexual encounter you had with Burroughs. God knows (yes, God is man-made, according to you) you fucked around, John! But William Burroughs? That is where I would draw the line. Physically, I have always mixed-up Burroughs with Marcel Duchamp. I have no idea why. But if I had to choose, I would definitely sleep with Duchamp, even though their minds feel alike.
Anyway, I am babbling. Let's get back to the show. I chose works that literally deal with scale, in every sense of the word. Things that are both tangible and abstract. It is concrete poetry in the most sculptural sense, but it begs the mind to wonder. I've included Dial-A-Poem in two versions – the original one you made, and the one Ugo made with Austrian poems when he did his show at the Secession in 2015. There's a very early print from 1968 called Black Cock that I'm excited to share with the audience. Typically, the show ends with one of your last pieces, Big Ego, which is presented in the dark basement space with a selection of your sound poems. I hope the show captures your spirit well. It has certainly become a very personal endeavor for me, hence the decision to write you a letter.
With much love and respect,
Krist
New York, June 3, 2024
Dear John,
To say that I think and talk about you every single day is weirdly not an overstatement. I promise it’s not creepy, either. I see your handwriting scrawled on countless pieces of paper in the archive, I hear your voice coming from the record player, and your words, painted on canvas, hang behind my desk as I write this—Carnations Gloriously Self-Serving—in bright orange and yellow. Most of all, what I see is your spirit of generosity in all of its many forms.
Big Ego. No city has a bigger ego than New York City, the city you called home for pretty much your entire life. This place has a huge God Complex—borderline pathological. It’s obsessed with itself. I mean…the Empire State? On St. Marks Street, tourists buy T-shirts that say New York Fucking City or, more to the point, Fuck you, you fucking fuck. It’s a my-way-or-the-highway kind of town.
What I find so remarkable about your life in this incredible and impossible city is that despite all of its aggressions, you managed to tap into its more compassionate flipside. You found ways to replace the bravado with a vulnerability that comes with letting go. You believed in solidarity and mutual aid. In what comes with being-in-the-trenches-together. Tragically, it was far from a level playing field, since racism, sexism, homophobia, and other systemic forms of violence inevitably tip the scales, benefiting some at the expense of others—much of which you encountered yourself.
And so you invented systems of support. The Giorno Poetry Systems. For decades, GPS provided a glimpse into a New York where peers show up for each other. Beyond just being a friend, lover, or collaborator with other artists, you wanted to know what they needed in order to make the art, the poetry, or the music they wanted to make. As a result, GPS put the voices of hundreds of poets on a phone line, it put hundreds of songs on its record label, it gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in small grants to artists with AIDS.
To me, GPS is not a what, it’s closer to a how— an attitude, a way of relating to others, perhaps even a tone of voice. It’s like the way a home-cooked meal is more than just food. Or the way a spoken word contains a thickness, a weight in the room, that a written word sometimes doesn't have. To know the difference doesn’t come from having certain pieces of information, but from witnessing the unpredictable ways it gets entangled into people's lives.
Krist says that this show deals with scale in every sense of the word, and mixed into all those Big Egos are hurricanes of cum—endless acts of giving a bit of yourself to others.
With much love in return,
Anthony
Volksgartenstrasse 3, 1010 Vienna
Sombor, Serbia, 1937 - Zagreb, Croatia, 2010
Bucharest, Romania, 1945, living in Bucharest);
* Leningrad, ex USSR, 1970 - living in Vienna, Austria
Nice, France, 1928 – Paris, France, 1962
Osijek, Croatia, 1924 – Paris, France, 2004
Pessac, France 1978 – living in Bordeaux, France
Piaseczno, Poland. 1977 – living in Warsaw, Poland and Casablanca, Morocco
Lyon, France, 1971 – living in Paris, France and New York, USA
Gabriela Gantenbein is an art historian and cultural manager specialising in contemporary art and works internationally as an art consultant and curator. She is the author of contributions to exhibition catalogues and artists' books and the editor of architectural and art history monographs. In selection: Textures of Thought. Geta Bratescu, Ion Grigorescu, Dan Perjovschi (2015), Come and Go (2014) and Hubert Gessner; Architect between Empire and Social Democracy 1871 - 1943(2011).in spring 2024 she published her first novel ‘Ereignishorizont’. She was the founding director of viennafair in Vienna (2005) and is a board member of the Tate acquisition committee CEEP. Gabriela Gantenbein lives and works in Vienna and France.
„Don`t ask me where we are going” ist der Titel eines 1966 von Tomislav Gotovac produzierten Films, dessen Titels sich die Kuratorin Gabriela Gantenbein für ihre gleichnamige Ausstellung in der Galerie Gregor Podnar in Wien bedient.
Im Zentrum des Ausstellungskonzepts steht der Begriff des „Archivs“ (aus dem Impulsessay „Untold Narratives“ von Noit Banai für Curated By Galerienfestival 2024), den Gabriela Gantenbein in einen philosophischen Kontext stellt, und in dem von C.G. Jung beschriebenen „kollektiven Unbewussten“ verortet.
Die acht Künstler*innen der Ausstellung öffnen ihre eigenen inneren Archive und teilen sie uns mit. Sie erzählen von der menschlichen Existenz, der Suche nach Freiheit, der Öffnung in ein universelles Unsagbares, der unauflösbaren Verbindung zu unserem Planeten und möglichen Metamorphosen. Ihre Arbeiten fordern auf, den Mut aufzubringen, in unser eigenes Archiv hineinzuschauen, und eine mögliche Antwort auf die Frage „where are we going“ zu finden - die Zukunft entsprechend gemeinsamer Erkenntnisse aus unseren inneren Archiven zu gestalten.
Nur durch Beachtung dieser inneren Archive, dem Verstehen der Evolutionsgeschichte, dem Respekt für die verschiedenen Existenzformen und die Besinnung auf unsere eigene Fragilität, bleibt unsere Existenz erhalten.
Text von Gabriela Gantenbein
Domgasse 6, 1010 Vienna
Del Ponte was born in 1936 in Milan, where she currently lives and works. From 1956 to 1961 she attended the sculpture class by Marino Marini at Accademia di Brera in Milan together with other artists such as Kengiro Azuma, Mario Robaudi e Gianni Colombo. In the 1960s Amalia Del Ponte began investigating materials and her nearly scientific approach led her to create basic and pure shapes. In the 1960s Amalia Del Ponte also designed the interiors of the Gulp! Store and of the first Fiorucci store in Milan. She became internationally acclaimed in 1973, when she was invited by Bruno Munari and Umbro Apollonio to participate in the São Paulo Art Biennial presenting her environment Area Percettiva, with which she won the First Prize for Sculpture. In 1993 Amalia Del Ponte exhibited her works at Fort Asperen in Asperen in the Netherlands. In 1995 Gillo Dorfles dedicated an entire room to her work in the Italian Pavilion at the 46th Venice Art Biennale, where she exhibited her sound-making stones, Litofoni, works of art that investigate the invisible relationship among geometric shapes, musical and color scales. In 2010, at Isola della Certosa in the Venetian Lagoon, she conceived Regno dei possibili invisibili, a video-installation inside the four pillboxes on the island (former Austrian armories built right on the shore). In the last few years Amalia Del Ponte has been at the center of a research aimed to re-positioning her work in the Italian art scene of the second half of the Twentieth century. These new studies led to a solo show at Museo del Novecento and Studio Museo Francesco Messina in Milan in 2017.
Roberta Tenconi is Chief Curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, where she curated solo shows by artists including Giorgio Andreotta Calo, Leonor Antunes, Rosa Barba, Neïl Beloufa, Maurizio Cattelan, Petrit Halilaj, Ann Veronica Janssens, Eva Kot’átková, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Laure Prouvost, Nari Ward, Cerith Wyn Evans. Focused on collaborating with artists in commissioning and producing experimental and ambitious projects in unconventional spaces and complex contexts, and in emphasizing the exhibition-making as a medium to explore and learn about our present, her upcoming curated projects include solo shows by artists Saodat Ismailova and Nan Goldin. Part of the curatorial team of the 55. Venice Biennale Arte “The Encyclopedic Palace” (2013) and of the fourth Berlin Biennale (2006), she collaborated with museums, institutions, foundations and non-profit associations cross the world on various projects and programs such as at the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, the Gwangiu Biennale, the Aïshti Foundation and Manifesta, working with artists as Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Cyprien Gaillard, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Pipilotti Rist, Tino Sehgal, among the others. Roberta Tenconi has edited various artists’ monographies and volumes and regularly contributes to art catalogues and magazines. She has lectured and taught courses in art and curatorial studies and is currently a member of the Italian Council commission, a project of the Ministry of Culture in support of artistic, critical, and curatorial research in Italy and abroad.
Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder presents "Amalia Del Ponte. Appear by Disappearing," a solo exhibition by Italian artist Amalia Del Ponte. Curated by Roberta Tenconi as part of Curated by festival.
Taking its name from Amalia Del Ponte's notable 1970 sculpture Apparire/scomparendo, the exhibition “Appear by Disappearing" delves into the artist’s six-decade-long exploration of the ephemeral and the tangible, challenging the common notions of objecthood and the environment we inhabit.
Born in Milan in 1936, Del Ponte is a polyhedric artist whose pioneer research spans visual art and sound, and also extends into design, architecture, and jewelry. By continually pushing the boundaries of these disciplines, she has developed innovative approaches to materials and forms. Renowned for her groundbreaking sculptures, such as the iconic Plexiglass prisms known as Tropi—derived from the Greek "tropos," meaning "turning" or "change," a term also serving as rhetorical figure denotating deviation and transposition of meaning—and for her environmental installation Area Percettiva (Perceptual Area), with which she won the First Prize for Sculpture at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1973, Del Ponte's work embodies a profound engagement with principles of light, nature and technology.
Her use of intangible materials and the relationship between the visible and the invisible are central to her work. By bringing into play light’s properties—transparency, lightness, and fluidity—with the physical phenomena that stem from them—reflection and refraction—Del Pontes’ Plexiglass sculptures metamorphose the surrounding environment and create a continuous play of movable and virtual spaces, thus undermining the very notion of materiality and conventional perceptions. These gestures seek to render the indefinable and transitory nature of reality, in an attempt to eliminate boundaries between the built and the natural environments and to escape the idea of any authoritative or privileged point of view.
The project for Domgasse celebrates Amalia Del Ponte's innovative research on light, material, and sculpture, bridging the organic and inorganic worlds. This curated selection features historical works from the 1960s and 1970s and is inspired by two major shows she had in Milan: the 1967 exhibition at Galleria Vismara, curated by art critic Vittorio Fagone, which first presented her Plexiglass prismatic small sculptures Tropi, and the 1972 exhibition at Salone Annunciata, which included slide projections of colored images of liquid crystals as seen under the microscope alongside sculptures where Del Ponte experimented in expanding the Tropi in size to relate on the human body and in mixing Plexiglass with other materials such as concrete and iron. Each work from the Tropi series is about 20 cm height and has a perfectly smooth transparent surface, differing only in the sequential number of its title, the angles’ degrees that give the specific shape, and for the presence of certain engravings or carving, or even the insertion of a material as in Tropo n. 7, 1965.
As Del Ponte recalled on the occasion of her 1972 exhibition at Salone Annunciata: “More than in shape as an outcome, I have always been interested in the angles I chose, as they created an imaginary, dynamic space for vision, with a defined range of possibilities outside which external images, refracted and reflected, got fragmented, causing a continuous break of real perceptual patterns in the environment. Hence the need to reproduce the same object in larger size, not only as a “primary” object, but in order to stress its potential activity in itself and around itself.”
Eschenbachgasse 4, 1010 Vienna
born in 1953 in Emleben near Gotha, lives and works in Erfurt and the Netherlands. Stötzer, who was expelled from the Erfurt University of Education in 1976, was sent to Hoheneck women's prison for a year in 1977 for a petition against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann. After her release, she worked in a factory on probation, quit and ran the private "Galerie im Flur" in Erfurt until it was banned in 1981. Stötzer then began to work as an independent artist, was active in the East German art and underground scene, worked on her own exhibition projects and publications, and initiated and founded the Erfurt women's artists' group, whose work offered women resistance and "a projection surface as well as a place for political and social inscriptions" for more than ten years. In 1989, Stötzer was one of the initiators of the citizens' initiative "Women for Change" and was involved in the occupation of the Erfurt headquarters of the State Security Service. From 1990 onwards, she spent time abroad, combining public exhibitions, publications, symposia, work grants, lecture and reading tours. Since 2010 she has been a lecturer in performance at the University of Erfurt. In 2013, Stötzer was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for her political and artistic commitment in the GDR. Her book "The Long Arm of the Stasi. The Art Scene of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in Erfurt - a Report" was published in 2022.
An der Hülben 3, 1010 Vienna
Akeem Smith is a Philadelphia based multimedia artist working in sculpture and video. He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1991, and raised in the Waterhouse district of Kingston, Jamaica. Throughout his career, Smith has flattened the distinctions between conceptual art, fashion, and anthropology, in a pursuit to push up against the ideals of western cultural iconography. At the core of his practice is an interest in the economy of image production - in its political, social and commercial forms - and the role of the artist as archivist, intervening in the circulation of knowledge and cultural preservation.
Seilerstätte 7, 1010 Vienna
Geta Brătescu (b. Ploiești 1926, d. Bucharest 2018) is now widely regarded as one of Eastern Europe’s most important avant-gardists. In the Western art world, however, she remained largely obscure until her participation in documenta 14 in 2017 and the Venice Biennale of the same year. Questions of abstraction, the political potential of the image, and the subjective experience of self, memory, and history inform her stylistically diverse oeuvre in a wide range of media, which evolved under the repressive conditions of the Ceaușescu regime yet kept pace with the discourses of the Western avant-gardes. One of her most famous works is The Studio (1978), where Ion Grigorescu filmed her performance as she physically interacted with the room, measuring her size in the space and marking her place in the world. Her research on visual performative arts brought works like Towards White (1975), Self-Portrait and From Black to White (1976), in which her face and body play the main role in various theatrical sequences. In 2017 she represented Romania at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Paweł Kwiek (b. Warsaw 1951 – d. Warsaw 2022) was a Polish contemporary visual artist, photographer, and cinematographer. In 1973 Kwiek completed the Łódź Film School with a degree in cinematography. He was a co-founder and member of the Film Form Workshop (1970–1980) and lecturer at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1977–1978) and the Łódź Film School (1978–1981). One of the forerunners of video art in Poland, he made experimental films, photography and video, and authored manifestations, statements, and multidisciplinary artistic events combining culture and disciplines such as philosophy and cybernetics. Kwiek’s work is found in the collections of MSN Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, and the Kontakt Collection in Vienna. He had individual and group exhibitions including Documenta 6 (Kassel 1977); Works and Words (International Art Manifestation), Galerie de Appel (Amsterdam 1979); 1, 2, 3…Avant Garde, Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw 2007); Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2007); Sala Rekalde (Bilbao 2008); Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987, mumok (Vienna 2010); In the Near Future: The Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2014); Oskar Hansen: Open Form, MACBA (Barcelona 2014); and Rainbow in the Dark, SALT (Istanbul 2015).
Barbara Kozłowska (b. Tarnobrzeg 1940 – d. Wrocław 2008)
graduated from the Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts in 1965. She participated in some of the most important events for the Polish art scene in the 1970s and was a forerunner of performance art in Poland. In 1972 she launched the independent conceptual institution Babel Gallery at her private studio in Wrocław, which she ran until 1982 as an interdisciplinary meeting place for international artists. Kozłowska often used ephemeral, hardly perceptible, disinterested gestures in her art. Her works usually took the form of performance and elusive spatial interventions. Starting in 1970 she worked on the Borderline project, traveling to France, Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Siberia, the UK, the US and Yugoslavia.
Kozłowska participated in the seminal exhibitions of the Polish neo-avant-garde, including the Meetings of Artists and Art Theorists in Osieki (1970, 1971), the 4th Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elbląg (1971), and the survey Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences of Discourse, 1965–1975 at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2000). Since her death, Kozłowska’s work has been the subject of retrospectives at EL Gallery Art Center in Elbląg (2010) and the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, curated by Marika Kuźmicz (2020), as well as solo shows at the Arton Foundation, Warsaw (2016, 2020), and group exhibitions at venues including Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, and Kunstmuseum Bochum.
Jürgen Klauke (b. 1943 Cologne) is a singular phenomenon in contemporary art. Above all, he paved the way for staged photography by conceptualizing the photographic medium and elevating it to the immanent theme of his art. He raised the question of gender difference more emphatically and radically than others, exaggerating the problem of identity to the point of excess with sometimes provocative images. He himself speaks of the “aestheticization of the existential.”
He was a participant in Documenta 6 & 8 and the Venice Biennale in 1980. Major national and international solo exhibitions of his work to date include shows at Nationalgalerie Berlin; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Museum Boijmans van Beunigen, Rotterdam; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Museum of Modern Art Saitama, Museum of Modern Art Shiga and Yamaguchi Art Museum, Japan; Rudolfinum, Prague; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; ZKM Karlsruhe; MdM Salzburg; Max Ernst Museum, Brühl; and Fundación Helga De Alvear, Cásseres.
Krzysztof Niemczyk (b. Warsaw 1938 – d. Kraków 1994) was a self-taught writer, painter, performer, author of over 20 narratives (only two of them preserved to this day), but primarily the author of the epic novel The Courtesan and the Chicks, or a Crooked Mirror of Passionate Action, or A Study of Chaos (1965–1968), which was not published until 30 years later. In the late 1960s Niemczyk was closely associated with the Cricot 2 theatre established by Tadeusz Kantor, the Krzysztofory Kraków gallery, and the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, but he never exhibited his works there. Rather, he created numerous spontaneous and controversial actions and performances in public. Regarded as a genius by some, such as Kantor, and dismissed by others as a madman, he was persecuted and arrested, and spent many months in prison and in psychiatric hospitals in Kraków. His legendary apartment, which in the 1960s was a mecca of the Polish hippie movement and in 1965 was visited by Allen Ginsberg, was destroyed. What remains of his legacy is mostly his epic novel, a few narratives, fascinating correspondence with his sister and friends including Anka Ptaszkowska, paintings, photographs documenting his “actions” and happenings, and his self-portraits in various media. The paintings and photographs, and the eponymous courtesan from his novel—an alter ego of the author—have built the image of Krzysztof Niemczyk as the first Polish 20th-century queer artist. In recent years, his works have been exhibited at MOCAK Kraków, MSN Warsaw, and Documenta 14, among other venues.
Edita Schubert (b. Virovitica, Yugoslavia (now Croatia) 1947 – d. Zagreb 2001) was a Croatian painter. A 1971 graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb (class of Miljenko Stančić), from 1972 to 2001 she worked as a sketch artist in the anatomy department of the University of Zagreb School of Medicine. At first, her work was hyperrealist, then she created installations with a magical tension in humble materials (leaves, fabric, sand) which she combined with painted surfaces. In the 1980s her work related to several trends, primarily the trans-avant-garde, in a local version called Nova Slika. By the late 1980s, she was painting compositions of intense colours in the spirit of the New Geometry. Seeking to combine the individual level of reality with the wider context, she started working on Ambiental installations. Early in her career, in the late 1970s, she began working in the medium of photography. Schubert exhibited widely in her native Croatia during her three decades of artistic activity, including representing Yugoslavia in the Venice Biennale and the 4th Sydney Biennale (both 1982). She was the subject of a comprehensive posthumous retrospective at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb.
Marika Kuźmicz, PhD, is an art historian, curator and researcher. She is a dean of the Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is also a lecturer at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. For many years she has conducted research on Polish art of the 1970s, particularly advocating for performance, photography and video art.
In 2010 she established the non-profit organization Arton Foundation in Warsaw. Arton is devoted to developing archives and estates of women artists. Marika is the author or editor of many books, such as The Workshop of the Film Form (2016, co- edited with Łukasz Ronduda, published by Sternberg Press) and many monographs on Polish artists.
She has curated many exhibitions in Poland and abroad, most recently Her Own Way: Female Artists and the Moving Image in Art in Poland (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum) and the monographic exhibition on Barbara Kozłowska You Can See It All Anywhere (2020, Museum of Contemporary Art, Wrocław) and Jerzy Rosłowicz. Alchemic (2022, Muzeum of Contemporary Art., Wrocław). Marika was the main coordinator of the international art project “Forgotten Heritage: European Avant-Garde Art Online” dedicated to rediscovering marginalized avant-garde artists from Poland, Croatia, Belgium and Estonia. She was the main coordinator and curator of the project “Not Yet Written Stories: Women Artists’ Archives Online,” focusing on women artists from the 1960s and 1970s. The project was, among others, supported by Creative Europe, in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts in Riga and the Centre for Contemporary Arts SCCA in Ljubljana.
Since November 2022 she works for Muzeum Susch as a main curator of reseach for the Susch Institute. She conducts her research focused on women artists from Switzerland and Central and Eastern Europe.
Sometimes if a story from the past needs to be told, it will find its own way to reach the present, to resonate with our here and now. But stories need to be persistently sought out, their linearity reconstructed, the paradoxes they contain heard, to find an audience, to be known, sometimes for the first time, even though years may have passed since they happened. All this time, the story may have remained silent, only to suddenly find itself, appear, be heard, change something just by having happened.
Stories have their protagonists, and to really tell their story, you must see them. Only then will the words form a narrative, and resonate. Perhaps this is why the creation of self-portraits has so often become a gesture of emancipation, of making one’s presence known and telling one’s own story. This has played, and revealed, a special role in the art history of women, who for centuries were deprived of the opportunity to study in academies, so that often their own face and body was the only model available to them. Creating self-portraits was and is also a key way for them to express their sexual identity, which could not resonate due to social restrictions.
You Will Hear When You See Me is an exhibition of self-portraits created in various Central and Eastern European countries in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired not so much by a desire for self-memory as to build and mark the artist’s place in a particular context, and through this gesture, to loosen the norms and rules that created it. By marking their presence, by documenting it, by the brute fact of recording their being, artists from this part of the world defined, built and constructed their subjectivity. In the creative process they often had to face the mechanisms of censorship, sometimes in a milder form, but sometimes they worked in the context of an extremely oppressive regime, where even the mere painting of their own image could become grounds for persecution.
Such was the case with one of Romania’s most important artists, Geta Brătescu. Self-portraiture holds a special place in her work. Brătescu examined life under the totalitarian regime in communist Romania, posing questions of identity, self-censorship and private spheres to reflect the widespread repression and the artistic ban on deviation from official state lines.
Her work focused heavily on the contradiction between the official state artistic direction, which rejected and punished any aesthetics questioning the regime, and the haven of private studios, where artists managed to evade censorship. Brătescu explored this reality in a collage of self-portraits called Censored Self-Portrait. The artist’s face covered by collage strips drawing attention to her mouth and eyes is a silent but effective testament to the stifling political environment of communist Romania.
Literal performative actions using both the self-portrait and the medium of painting were realized by Croatian artist Edita Schubert. Her work with the canvas consisted not only of painting it, but above all of cutting it. In some works, through the cut slits, we can see fragments of Schubert’s body, a female artist attempting to transcend not only the limits of the medium, but perhaps also the limits of the male-dominated art world.
On the other hand, Barbara Kozłowska, a Polish artist who executed her performance piece Border Line over several decades, marked and documented her presence on the beaches of the world. Behind the action was the conceptual idea of drawing a line across the entire earth, all the way to the moon, but in essence it can be read as a gesture of freedom, another challenge to an oppressive state that restricted its citizens’ ability to move freely. An additional aspect of Kozłowska’s work was her creation of different versions of her biography, which she distributed through her mail art or exhibited together with her documentation from Border Line.
Another sort of challenge to the system is Video A, a “partial” self-portrait by Paweł Kwiek, one of the first video works made in this part of Europe, created in the studio of a state TV station, where it was also broadcast in 1975. At the same time, Kwiek reveals to viewers the mechanism of image manipulation, and defines his position in relation to others and in relation to the space and the cameras recording him.
The creation of photographic and painterly self-portraits was the domain of the Polish artist, outsider, performer and writer Krzysztof Niemczyk, who developed an alter-ego, the female character the Courtesan referenced in the title of his novel The Courtesan and the Chicks, or a Crooked Mirror of Passionate Action, or A Study of Chaos. While he was writing the book, he painted androgynous self-portraits and also applied makeup to himself for the purpose of creating photographs, which together with the oil paintings were a kind of visualization of the Courtesan. Most of the oeuvre of Niemczyk, who was persecuted among other reasons due to his sexual orientation, was destroyed by the secret police. Like the German artist Jürgen Klauke, Niemczyk challenged the explicitness of sexual orientation. With his own self-portraits, Klauke operated on the boundary of gender identity, polemicizing against the social imperative to define that identity. All of these attitudes do not exhaust the possibilities of using self-portraiture on the path to personal and artistic emancipation, but they do provide a good starting point on the subject.
Self-portraiture is one of the most vital tools for exploring identity, including gender identity, and telling a story, as German artist Jürgen Klauke does. His photographic self-portraits created over several decades are a story of how fluid gender identification is. The next step in the creation of self-images is photographs of his own body taken with an X-ray machine. This self-photographic visual narrative by Klauke throws down a gauntlet to societies that categorize and label, and have recurring and renewed problems with individuals who defy categorization.
All the stories presented in the exhibition are stories from the past, found in the archives, rescued from past time and oblivion. They can serve as a touchstone for our struggle with the complexity of everyday life and identity, and raise crucial questions.
Hintzerstraße 4/1, 1030 Vienna
Lydia Ricci is a sculptor that makes imperfectly perfect replicas of quotidian moments and objects from a pile of scraps and everyday detritus accumulated over the last 30 years. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and also studied design in St Gallen, Switzerland and printmaking in Cortona, Italy. She teaches classes in design and storytelling at The University of the Arts. Her sculptures have been exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Marfa, Boston, Philadelphia, and featured in publications including The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and Vice. Her animations have been included in The San Francisco, Mill Valley and Philadelphia Film Festivals.
Breite Gasse 17, 1070 Vienna
Akosua Odeibea Amoah-Yeboah (*1998) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores transformation through digital mediums. She is interested in systems of signs, language, appropriation, memes, politics of the body, and technology. She transforms these ideas from one form to another, as she sees the ideas as materials that can be expanded beyond their bare forms (materials of elasticity/malleability). Her works span from digital paintings and video installations to musical scripts and sounds. Her present works concisely hack into audio-visual software to create errors and glitches in readymade algorithms. This involves an ouroboros process of 'force-feeding' texts and videos to audio software, resulting in technological repulsion translated into dissonant sounds—like text or video data eating itself in an incompatible audio medium.
Kelvin Kweku Haizel’s (b.1987) artistic practice spans painting, conceptual photography, and archival interventions. Beyond his paintings that borrow their aesthetic from transactional processes of paint retail shops across his home country, his photographic interests began with an ontological question – what is the object of an image? This interest has seen him develop experiments in manufacturing images via the expanded field of the photographical. From snap to staged, documentary to archival inquiry, his approach to image has been consistent with his interest in unsettling the privilege accorded to the picture as the site of meaning, relying on historic events as a decoy. His extended bodies of work seem to ask what can images do? It is a materialist attitude towards the production of images that sides with the multiplicity and plasticity of the image in its phenomenological manifestations. Haizel’s materialist attitude to manufacturing images has resulted in different bodies of work that have shown in exhibitions in his home country Ghana and internationally.
Gideon Hanyame (b. 1996) is a Ghanaian artist whose interest in creating “things” with materials and objects responds to transformation—deconstruction and reconstruction—in relation to ideas of identity, flexibility, aesthetics, and the imitation of objects that consolidate painting and sculpture. He employs various indigenous textile-making and printing processes such as tie-dye, weaving, and complex techniques of detangling and unraveling strands of cotton to produce fringe-like objects that exhibit characteristics of tapestry, installations, painting, and sculpture.
Daniel Arnan Quarshie (*1995) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, installation, sculpture, and sound. His practice emerged as an attempt to redefine drawing to match up to others like painting and sculpture. His work deals with social themes like death, loss, absence, memory, and the passage of time, and engages with the politics of capitalism, labor, overconsumption, and environmental degradation. He continuously challenges his medium by borrowing from the mundane to investigate composition, form, scale, and display formats.
blaxTARLINES KUMASI is a mutable experimental incubator of contemporary art and a sharing community which grew out of kąrî'kạchä seid'ou’s project to ‘transform art from commodity to gift’, and responsible for demystifying art from classical and pre-1960s European modernist predeterminations in Ghana’s foremost art college in KNUST, Kumasi. Functioning as a trans-generational and trans-cultural community operating on a generative model and affirmative politics, blaxTARLINES has implemented a broad set of initiatives toward the growth and sustenance of criticality in art practice in Ghana and beyond by building hard and soft infrastructure including co-developing cultural platforms, curriculums, residencies, social networks, studios, and public access art spaces. Through its collaborative approach, blaxTARLINES has also been involved in a number of world stage exhibitions. The most recent is its contribution to the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphics Arts in collaboration with Ibrahim Mahama and Exit Frame, both members of the blaxTARLINES network. Art Review named blaxTARLINES in its Power 100 for 2022 and 2023. Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu (Castro) a co-founder, Administrative Director, and one of the artistic directors of blaxTARLINES, complements the vision of blaxTARLINES with his specialization in directing historical and thematic exhibitions per a postcolonial lens, drawing connections between past and present, local and international artistic practices. Kissiedu is also a senior lecturer at the famed Fine Art Department at KNUST, where together with kąrî'kạchä seid'ou and other colleagues, have pioneered revolutionary changes in fine art pedagogy, producing artists like Ibrahim Mahama and making Kumasi a creative and inspiring international art hub. Nuna Adisenu-Doe, a member and long-time collaborator of the blaxTARLINES community is a curator and the Founding Director of Compound House Gallery, Accra, Ghana. He was a student of kąrî'kạchä seid'ou and Kissiedu. Drawing inspiration from the emancipatory and radical practices of blaxTARLINES, Kumasi, Nuna embraces the ethos of Compound House Gallery as a space that foregrounds experimentation and stimulates the political sensitivity of artists. Working as an independent curator, his practice focuses on the debris of mass culture as a birthplace of philosophical truths.
Ballgasse 6, 1010 Vienna
Mariana Lemos (b. 1991, Lisbon), is an independent curator based in London. Her practice focuses on performance art, affect, queer/feminist phenomenologies, and issues related to illness and disability. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths University of London (2020) and a BA in Fine Arts (2015).
Her curatorial approach centres on public programming, accessibility, and feminist methodologies, often working collectively and collaboratively. Lemos is a member of the FDRG feminist reading group and the SALOON London board. She was Co-Editor at Mercurius Magazine and has written for Art Review, Flash Art, Mousse and Concreta. She has worked as the studio manager for artist Angela de La Cruz and in galleries such as Lisson Gallery, Union Pacific, Arcadia Missa, Black Tower, and the Feminist Library. Recent projects include ‘Vaivém’ by Francisca Pinto at Ostra, Lisbon (PT/2024); ‘DIG IN: Maisie Maris & Laura Mallows’ at Staffordshire St, London (UK/2023); ‘INSOMNIA’ by Leah Clements at South Kiosk, London (UK/2022-23); and ‘Oceanic Feelings’ at Electro Studios Space, St Leonards (UK/2021).
A Tragical Romance is an evocative exhibition exploring the transcendent potential of the human body through the works of artists Leah Clements, Rebecca Jagoe, Korallia Stergides and Marianne Vlaschits. Moving beyond the conventional boundaries of human form, these artists delve into non-human connections, embracing the natural and supernatural realms to create a narrative of unity and interconnectedness.
The exhibition challenges the able-bodied perspective, highlighting how desire, love, and intimacy can foster new forms of crip embodiment. The works presented in A Tragical Romance engage with elements such as water, rocks, ghosts, and animals, inviting viewers to consider an over-identification with the external world. This shift is articulated through various mediums, including photography, sculpture, painting and performance, with text serving as a central axis for this exploration.
The artworks reflect a profound sentimentality, addressing the fantasy of crossing the human/non-human divide and the grim reality of our toxic relationship with nature in the face of climate destruction. This exhibition draws parallels with the Romantic era, known for its intense emotions and fascination with the sublime. Like the Romantics, these contemporary works navigate the interplay between beauty and darkness, exploring themes of sorrow, loss, and the fragility of life. In doing so, they offer a contemplative reflection on mortality, particularly through the lens of illness and disability.
Franz-Josefs-Kai 3, 1010 Vienna
Piero Bisello is an art critic based in Brussels. He has a background in art history and philosophy, with a specialization in analytic aesthetics. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Artforum, Glean, CFA among others. He was an editor of CFA from 2019 till 2023. He currently co-runs Gauli Zitter in Brussels.
