Ingeborg Strobl, FLORA

Arbeiterkammer Wien, 1. Juni bis November 2017

kuratiert von Maren Lübbke-Tidow

Für Ingeborg  (1949 – 2017)

In der Vorbereitung zu dieser Ausstellung hat Ingeborg Strobl mich in Gesprächen immer wieder sanft aufmunternd dazu aufgefordert, doch meinen Text zu ihrem Konzept, zu ihrer Arbeit beizusteuern. Über einen früheren Text von mir zu ihrer Arbeit waren wir überhaupt erst in näheren Kontakt und in einen guten Austausch gekommen. Es war klar, dass ich auch zu diesem aktuellen Projekt etwas schreiben würde – für den Folder zur Ausstellung und vielleicht einen etwas ausführlicheren Pressetext. Doch die Deadline war noch weit weg, und einen Text einzuschieben, wenn es noch Zeit gibt, die Abgabe also noch nicht zwingend erforderlich ist – welcher Autor macht das schon? Ich tat es nicht.

Nach Ingeborgs Tod vor erst wenigen Wochen, mit dem auch ich als Kuratorin dieses Projekts wie vielleicht auch einige von Ihnen im Wortsinn nicht “gerechnet” hatte (wie leicht es doch ist, Signale zu überhören, zu missdeuten oder gar zu ignorieren) musste der einführende Text zum Konzept und zur Arbeit für Folder und Pressetext ohnehin eine Diktion erhalten, die er in einer vorzeitig erstellten Version niemals gehabt hätte – eine Diktion, die jetzt (in der neuen Situation) zugleich eine Würdigung der Künstlerin selbst darstellte.

Ja, ein frühzeitig erstellter Text zum Projekt “Flora” hätte – wäre ich dem Wunsch Ingeborgs gefolgt und hätte vor der Zeit, vor dem Abgabetermin geliefert – verworfen werden müssen. Obwohl: Hätte er?

Heute frage ich mich: Vielleicht war es genau das, was Ingeborg wollte. Einen (hoffentlich) guten, bitte unsentimentalen, faktisch einführenden Text, ohne Zuschreibungen, die die Künstlerpersönlichkeit selbst betreffen, sondern der nur die Arbeit im Fokus hat.

In meinem Kurztext zur Ausstellung ist nun mit Blick auf Ingeborg Strobl zu lesen, dass sie unbestechlich, freigeistig, engagiert und autonom war. Man kann diese Worte sicher stehen lassen, auch, um ein Sensorium dafür zu entwickeln, wie sich ihr Werk – dieser große, offene, nicht abschließbare, und sich mit Ingeborgs Mäandern durch die unterschiedlichen Territorien der Welt und durch die unterschiedlichen Territorien der Kunst in immer wieder neuen Konstellationen verändernde Korpus – entwickelt hat. Man kann aber auch ausschließlich durch die Betrachtung der Arbeit einen Zugang entwickeln, der in exakt diese Zuschreibungen führt: unbestechlich, freigeistig, engagiert und autonom. Warum nicht genau so?

Ingeborg Strobl selbst hat immer wieder den für sie wichtigen Unterschied zwischen dem “Drinnen” und dem “Draußen” betont.

Das “Drinnen” war für sie die Kunstbetrieb, ein eigener abgeschlossener Kosmos, in dem sie sich zeitweilig bewegte und ihre Arbeiten zeigte – gepaart mit dem Verlangen, möglichst alle Bereiche der Produktion selbst in die Hand zu nehmen und zu steuern. Das zeigen ihre stets selbst gestalteten vielen (Künstler-)Bücher, ihre selbst entwickelten Ausstellungsdisplays und natürlich die Arbeiten selbst, die sich im jeweiligen Buch- oder Ausstellungsraum entfalten. Begleitende Texte kommen übrigens nicht viele vor, wenngleich ihre eigene Arbeit textbasiert ist.

Das “Draußen” hingegen war für sie das Leben, das sie (wie alle anderen Künstler_innen) ja neben der Kunst auch führte. Ein Raum, der genauso existenzbegründend und erfahrungsbeladen ist wie das “Drinnen”. Dieses “Draußen”, und was dort auffindbar ist, nach “Drinnen” zu holen, aber war Motor ihrer Arbeit. Oder wie Stella Rollig schreibt: “Das Werk (…)  als Teil einer integralen Lebens- und Kunstpraxis, in der Sehen, Denken, Aufspüren, Entdecken, Fotografieren, Filmen, Formen und Gestalten kontinuierlich stattfinden, ineinander übergehen”. Ich glaube, dass Ingeborg Strobl die Grenzen zwischen dem “Drinnen” und “Draußen” für sich persönlich sehr genau gezogen hatte, anstelle des fließenden Ineinanderübergehens, wie es in dem Zitat von Rollig anklingt, würde ich eher von einem Transfer sprechen wollen, konzeptionell sehr genau und gleichzeitig trennscharf gedacht, aber nie übertheoretisiert.

Ich will mit dieser kleinen Rede meine Textschulden einlösen, und für Ingeborg die erwartete verschriftlichte Rahmung liefern, einen Text aber, der im “Drinnen” seinen Raum findet, der also nur das Konzept und die Arbeit im Blick hat und nicht Ingeborg als Persönlichkeit – das “Draußen” (meinetwegen können wir es auch Strobls “Denken über die Kunst und über das Leben und was das eine für das andere tun kann” nennen) zeigt sich dann schon ganz von selbst.

“Flora” – so hat die Künstlerin Ingeborg Strobl dieses Projekt für die Arbeiterkammer übertitelt. Es ist ein Begriff, der alle drei Ebenen, die diese Ausstellung umschließt (Wände, Bilder, Texte), zusammenführt.

Ebene 1: die Wände
Wie auch schon in früheren Ausstellungszusammenhängen, wie etwa in ihrer Ausstellung “Liebes Wien, Deine Ingeborg Strobl” im Wien Museum 2015 oder punktuell in ihrer großen Ausstellung im Lentos Museum Linz im vergangenen Jahr hat Ingeborg Strobl die Wände auch hier in verschiedenen Pastelltönen farbig gestaltet. Auf die unterschiedlichen Farbgründe wurde sodann in Walzentechnik ein je anderes florales, repetitives Muster aufgetragen. Ornamente sind entstanden, eine oft aufzufindende Praxis bei Strobl – nicht um ins Dekorative abzugleiten, sondern um das Ornament mit Inhalt aufzuladen. Sie will, wie Wolfgang Kos es einmal mit Blick auf die Künstlerin formulierte, das Schöne des Ornaments in einen Dialog bringen mit dem Nützlichen und dem Wichtigen.

Strobl greift mit der Technik der Musterwalzen die Wandgestaltungskultur profaner Wohnbauten auf, so wie sie sowohl im ländlichen als auch im städtischen Raum ab den 1920er Jahren bis in die 1970er Jahre auffindbar war. Sie schafft damit eine vertraut-wohnliche Atmosphäre. Und schleust mit dieser Entscheidung Formen einer universell verständlichen Alltagskultur in diesen Kunst (?)-Kontext?

Ja, der Raum dieser sechs Wände ist der Kunst zugedacht, klar, seit 2008, seit wir mit den AKKunstprojekten begonnen haben. Aber, wir wissen es, das kulturelle Engagement der AK bringt die Kunst in die Situation, sich mit dieser halböffentlichen Spähre und Atmosphäre einer Beratungshalle auseinandersetzen zu müssen. Ein guter Boden für Ingeborg Strobl, die zwar wahrscheinlich wie die meisten Künstler_innen den White Cube auch für sich als ideale Spielstätte ihrer Werke gesehen hat, die aber ansprang, wie ihre vielen Kunst-am-Bau-Projekte gezeigt haben, wenn es darum ging, der öffentlichen Spähre mit ihren Eingriffen etwas hinzuzufügen. Sie muss dazu nichts erfinden. Sondern greift schlicht das auf zurück, was ohnehin im “Draußen” existiert, fügt es dem Raum hinzu und evoziert damit atmosphärisch etwas Neues, etwas “Wichtiges und Nützliches”. Denn wenn wir nun hier, in diesen Räumen, genau hinsehen, dann ist erstaunlich, dass selbst die unterhalb der Ausstellungswände liegenden Lüftungsschächte – wie auch die Möblierung dieser Beratungshalle – durch Strobls Strategie des Hineinschleusens von Formen einer universell verständlichen Alltagskultur plötzlich nicht mehr als potenzielle Gefahrenmomente für das Wirkpotenzial der Kunst oder gar als Störfaktoren in der Kunstbetrachtung wahrgenommen werden, sondern die im Gegenteil: die sich mit den Wänden einfügen in ein Gesamtbild. Auch das Wohnzimmer feiert in der Regel seine fröhliche Heimeligkeit durch das Nebeneinander von Ungleichem, durch die Ko-Existenz von Dingen, die nicht zusammengehören, und die doch alle gleichermaßen für Momente des Behagens notwendig sind, kurz: Funktonalität trifft auf individuelle Gestaltungsmomente. Die Künstlerin weiß diesen Moment stark zu machen, und mit ihrem Eingriff allein über die Grundierung der Wände eine erste Geste zu setzen, die das Potenzial hat, die Atmosphäre des Raumes in seiner Gesamtheit zu verändern – und zu bestimmen. So war auch das erste Wort, dass mir gestern beim Betreten dieser Installation von Ingeborg durch den Kopf schoss, nicht der Titel der Arbeit, “Flora”, sondern: “Zuhause”. Welches andere Wort kann nützlicher und wichtiger sein für die Kundinnen, die die AK mit existenziellen Fragen aufsuchen, als eines im Zungenschlag von “Zuhause”. Genau das war auch mit “Flora” ihr Anliegen: Ingeborg Strobl hat klar formuliert, dass sie etwas tun möchte, was die Menschen, die hierher kommen, an etwas erinnert, was ihnen vertraut ist, ganz schlicht. Sie wollte dem Raum Wärme und etwas Heimeliges geben. Das Ornament ist ein erster Schritt dahin. 

Ebene 2: die Bilder

Die Bilder tun das ihrige dazu. Die Fotografien, die Ingeborg Strobl auf die Wände gebracht hat, stammen aus ihrem Archiv. Die Ökonomie der Mittel war ihr wichtig. Warum etwas Neues erfinden, wenn schon alles gefunden ist? In einem Text aus dem Jahre 2005 schreibt ebenfalls Wolfgang Kos von noch 500 unentwickelten Filmrollen Ingeborg Strobls, die Künstlerin fotografierte analog… es sind sicher noch einige nach dieser Zeit hinzugekommen, aus denen sie schöpfen konnte.

Ingeborg Strobl hat nie in abschließbaren Werkserien gedacht. Sie arbeitete auf allen Ebenen ihres Schaffens mit dem Prinzip der Collage, und bringt mit ihren Bildern, die sie ihrem enormen Fundus entnehmen konnte, in installativen Settings immer wieder neue Konstellation vor.

Wenngleich sie sich auch intensiv und auf eine unsentimentale Art mit der Fauna auseinandergesetzt hat – mit der Tierwelt – so sollte ihr für die AK die Flora – die Pflanzenwelt – zum Leitfaden für ihr visuelles System, verteilt über diese sechs Wände, werden. Der ewige Kreislauf allen Lebens – Werden und Vergehen – geriet ihr in diesem einer ihrer letzten Projekte zum Thema, ganz einfach vermittelt mit dem Lauf der Jahreszeiten: Frühling, Sommer, Herbst und Winter. Auch hier arbeitet sie mit einem universell verstehbarem Ansatz, appelliert an grundlegende Momente des Sehens und Erfahrens – mit den Momenten, an denen wir uns vielleicht am meisten selber spüren: in der Naturwahrmehmung: Das Entdecken der ersten Blüten, die sich im Frühjahr durch das tote Holz des Bodens durchgearbeitet haben, und flächendeckend das Alte überziehen – und uns ein erstes Versprechen sind. Dann: das Wuchern des Wiesengrüns im Sommers, Bilder voller kitzeliger Fülle und Reichtum, nicht unbedingt prachtvoll, aber üppig. Zum Fallenlassen. Dann: der Herbst, an manchen Stellen ist die Flora noch Grün, an anderen schon durchwittert und von Ingeborg Strobl hier thematisch zugespitzt mit dem zutiefst symbolischen Bild einem Weges. Abschließend der Winter, mit abgestorbenem Geäst, doch von Licht durchzogen, was die klirrende Kälte noch verstärkt.

Gar nicht so einfach, als sogenannte Kunsttheoretikerin diese Motive in dieser Schlichtheit zuzulassen und auch in der Beschreibung unpräsentiös zu bleiben, ohne Übertheoretisierung, wie sie Ingeborg nicht mochte. Vielleicht kann man an dieser Stelle sagen, dass ihr Werk ganz grundsätzlich einen Charakter des Ephemeren hat. Das Beiläufige, Flüchtige und Unbestimmte war ihr Ausgangspunkt für die Entwicklung ihrer sich in räumlichen Zusammenhängen immer zu Installationen fügenden Arbeiten. Dabei aber ging es ihr nie um ein harmonisches Bild, so wie es in meiner Beschreibung ihres verbildlichten Jahreszeitenzyklus vielleicht angeklungen ist. Im Gegenteil. Der Lyrik setzte sie immer die Drastik entgegen, der Zartheit die Härte. Ingeborg Strobl reichte es nicht, gängige Vorstellungen von Naturschönheit zu bedienen. Sie arbeitete stets mit dem Prinzip der Gegensätzlichkeit, mit dem ihre Arbeiten ihren Biss erhalten. So setzt sie einer elegisch-vielleicht-romantischen Vorstellung von Natur den größtmöglichen Kontrast entgegen. Das Wilde, Ungestüme, Unzähmbare und Unaufhaltbare der sogenannten freien Natur mit ihrem (in den Bildern noch intaktem) biologischem Kreislauf trifft in ihrer Auswahl – hier in den mittleren beiden Wänden – auf die domestizierte Natur im städtischen Alltag, auf eine gestaltete und umgrenzte Garten- oder Vorgartenkultur, die sie noch in den kleinsten Winkeln, beispielweise in einer Schaufensterdekoration oder auch auf Grabstätten, findet.

 

Ingeborgs Bilder formieren sich nie zu einem großen Ganzen, so wie es vielleicht einem klassischen dokumentarischen fotografischen Ansatz entspräche. Ihr Blick trifft vielmehr ins Alltägliche, ins Nebensächliche, ins Absurde, manchmal auch ins Komische und gerade deshalb ins so Normale. Es sind entspannte, kluge und witzige fotografische Studien, die ohne große Geste auskommen und die sich doch mitteilen – nicht nur, weil sie das “Draußen” repräsentieren, das sie ins “Drinnen” holt, sondern vor allem, weil sie genau sind und stets von großer Empathie für die kleinen Gesten des Alltags und wie sich diese am Gegenstand manifestieren, getragen sind, besonders dann, wenn sich mit ihnen unerwartete, aber herrliche Konstellationen ergeben.

 

Ebene 3: die Sprache

Strobls konzeptionelle Strenge und Genauigkeit, die sich erst mit einem zweiten Blick mitteilt, kommt über ihren Einsatz der Sprache schließlich auf der dritten Ebene des “Flora”-Projekt zur vollen Wirkung. Die textliche Rahmung lassen die sechs Wände auch auf einer formalen Ebene dichter zusammenrücken. Strobl braucht dafür nur vier Worte: Frühling, Sommer, Herbst und Winter. Diese vier Worte sind in diejenigen Sprachen übersetzt, die von den in der Halle wartenden Besucher_innen der Arbeiterkammer am häufigsten gesprochen werden: neben Deutsch und dem universellem Englisch sind dies Bosnisch, Kroatisch, Serbisch, Türkisch, Kurdisch und Ungarisch. Es ist klar, was die Künstlerin damit will: Nicht nur unterstreicht sie damit einfache Idee des gesamten Projekts “Flora” – die Thematisierung von Werden und Vergehen –, sondern holt mit ihnen auch fast alle Kund_innen der AK mit hinein in ihren Kosmos. Sie ist damit zugleich “Drinnen” und “Draußen” – wie auch jeder Betrachter und jede Betrachterin von “Flora”, wo auch immer jeder einzelne von uns sich gerade verorten mag. Es ist dies die große Qualität der Arbeit von Ingeborg Strobl: die Ebenen der Wahrnehmung tanzen zu lassen…. also dass “Draußen” zu erkennen, zuzulassen, und mit Scharfblick, subtiler Genauigkeit und mit Witz (!) ins “Drinnen” zu holen – vice versa.

Ich komme zum Schluss:
Die Realisierung dieser Arbeit ist trotz Ingeborg Strobls großer konzeptioneller Sorgfalt, die noch beinahe jedes Detail im Blick hatte, nicht ohne die Hilfe Vieler zustande gekommen. Ich danke zunächst der AK und hier vor allem Roman Berka, der dieses Projekt von Anfang an mit großem Engagement begleitet hat, der nicht nur für Ingeborg Strobl ein wichtiger Gesprächspartner war, sondern auch vor Ort die Koordination mit allen weiteren Akteurinnen mit großer Umsicht übernommen hat. Danke Roman. Petra Egg hat auf der Grundlage des analogen Fotomaterials die Digitalisierung der Daten übernommen, den Print überwacht und sich um die Rahmung gekümmert. Auch dies konnte – wie das gesamte Projekt – noch von Ingeborg Strobl präzise vorbereitet werden. Herzlichen Dank, Petra Egg, dafür, dass wir heute vor wunderschönen Prints mit einer Hingabe ans Material, wie sie für Ingeborg typisch waren, stehen können.

Auch Anna Breitenberger war von Anfang an involviert und hat die ersten graphischen Konzeptionen für die sechs Wände erarbeitet, die die Grundlage bildeten für alle weiteren, von Ingeborg Strobl vorgenommenen Feinjustierungen. Ihr oblag mit Ingeborgs prekärer werdendem Gesundsheitszustand die Koordinierung des Projekts, und ich bedauere, dass Anna Breitenberger heute nicht persönlich anwesend sein kann, um meinen Dank persönlich entgegenzunehmen. Im weiteren Prozess der konkreten Umsetzung vor Ort sind schließlich Annelies Oberdanner und Alexandra Schlag hinzugekommen. Ihnen Beiden danke ich herzlich dafür, dass das farbliche und grafische Zusammenspiel von Wandfarbe und -muster und den Fotografien ganz im Sinne der Vorstellungen der Künstlerin – die uns heute fehlt – so feinsinnig und genau geworden ist.

AK Kunstprojekte (exhibtion website)

Flora, Ingeborg Strobl (pdf)

Ein schöner Text von Luisa Ziaja über die Ausstellungvon FLORA von Ingeborg Strobl findet sich in der Ausgabe Nr. 139 (2017) von Camera Austria International (Graz). order this magazine

 

Friedl Kubelka, Atelier d’Expression (Dakar)

Camera Austria, Graz, 11.6. – 14.8.2016 (cat.)

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

Friedl Kubelka, Pavillion (Atelier d’Expression / Clinique Psychiatrique de Fann, Dakar), 2015/16.

 

Playful Countermovements

by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

Imagine the following situation: a curator invites an artist to parti­cipate in an exhibition and then comes to realise that the artist has spanned a web of subversive practices that thwart both the conventional mechanisms of art production and those at play in an exhibition context. How might one connect such contrary movements? In view of this thwarting of mechanisms related to art production, it makes sense to shift the gaze to the work of the artist and her way of working. Yet when it comes to the thwarting of the mechanisms involved in the production of exhibitions, it is crucial to foster openness. It is beneficial to actually not know how each project will end so as to find new paths in the process.

 

Exhibition view (cinema) Friedl Kubelka: Atelier d’Expression (Dakar), Camera Austria, Graz, 10.6. – 14.8.2017. Photo: Arlene Joobes.

 

The Exhibition

“Friedl Kubelka: Atelier d’Expression (Dakar)” introduces the artist’s most recent work. Reflection on her own role as an artist, which is related to the decision to increasingly withdraw her previous artistic work from the systems governing the art market, coincides with Kubelka’s interest in people who are engaging in artistic activity while remaining outside the dominant establishment. The exhibition by Friedl Kubelka is devoted to these so-called “outsiders” and their art. She visited the Atelier d’Expression in Dakar, a psychiatric clinic in Senegal, which gives patients an opportunity to pursue, among other things, artistic activity. The exhibition shows portraits of the patients. These works are supplemented by the artwork of those portrayed in Senegal. The latter assumes an essential position within the exhibition and will be sold at an a(u)ction organised by the artist to the benefit of the artist-patients. Becoming visible here, too, are Kubelka’s own (travel) experiences and the different levels of encounter with the city of Dakar and related structures. The work and the exhibition require different points of access. 

 

Friedl Kubelka, Atelier d’Expression (Clinique Psychiatrique de Fann, Dakar), 2015/16.

 

Working On and Against the Image: Behind Each Image Awaits Another

On the one hand, Friedl Kubelka presents her own work, which is clearly associated with her previous work as we know it. It deals with an act of contact initiation where two individuals enter into a relationship with each other, separated by the apparatus capturing the situation yet united through gazing into and through the camera.
Although a large portion of Friedl Kubelka’s œuvre involves portrait work, her artistic method is simultaneously always a way of working against the portrait. In fact, Kubelka constantly works against the idea of there being one valid picture. Her hourly, daily, or yearly portraits, all the way to a thousand-part portrait (“Tausend Gedanken”, 1980), are firstly time-cuts in the space of encounter between the artist and the person across from her; they speak of interplay among proximity and distance, of moving towards and away, or even deprivation. Perhaps they even speak more of the performance of encounter than actually presenting an image. The manipulative potential permeating her portrait sessions is especially evident in her films. The artist meets her protagonists with humour, devotion, or sometimes even with dispassion. The resulting images function as surveys of the status of both the person rendered and the image itself, a status which is constantly in motion. Stirring and touching unspoken norms without violently breaching them—this is the incredible strength yet also vulnerability of this œuvre, which cannot be termed documentary but rather brings forward the image as an event.
In the current portrait works, showing patients from the psychiatric ward of Fann Hospital in Dakar, it was important to the artist to maintain the integrity of her counterpart, and also to preclude the moments of derailment that repeatedly arise in her work—while especially (or once again!) making sure to fall short of expectations towards the represented vis-à-vis. Here we see no “outsiders”. This easily assigned ascription does not apply. Her protagonists are serious and tangible/unassailable. Their expressions or poses give no indication of an identity disorder. At times, art utensils like a paintbrush give an indication of their self-conception as artistically engaged individuals. Otherwise we—like the artist Papis (Babacar Gaye), whose face is largely covered by the grass in which he is resting—are left alone in the thicket of our diffuse conceptions of the people whom Friedl Kubelka came across in Senegal.
On the other hand, the exhibition speaks of different experiential levels owing to travel to a country that provokes a wealth of projections and ascriptions. The artist, as a purposely non-sovereign master of the traversed West African region, works with the inner and outer contradictions leading her through the country, and she lends visual form to these contrasts in photographs of architecture and urban structures, of their own seductive beauties and very real precipices. An artwork thus arose that may beg to be politically read, but in which, during the act of viewing, the personal realm of experience very clearly pushes itself in between and to the forefront again and again. This induces moments of disruption. Even just hearing the word “Africa” alarms us. We demand clarity, and objectivity, and knowledge, information, discretion, and precepts. All this must be conveyed by the work of a European artist who is moving within this space. All this may be of interest or known to the artist, but for her work on the image this expectation plays no role whatsoever. Kubelka expressly does not push aside the common, extant projections in order to arrive at an adjusted image that, in the best case scenario, conveys objectifiable knowledge or establishes an unassailable work. Instead, she presents herself through her images as a traveller and foreigner who is guilty/innocent, knowledgeable/lacking in knowledge, open-curious/full of angst and shame. Only one thing is pivotal: anything goes.

 

Exhibition view Friedl Kubelka: Atelier d’Expression (Dakar), Camera Austria, Graz, 10.6. – 14.8.2016. Photo: Arlene Joobes.

 

 

Friedl Kubelka, Papis (Babacar Gaye), 2015/16.

 

Breaking through Established Cycles of Use: Unsaleable/Saleable

These works originated through the impulses of a continually productive artist—without the definite intent to release the works, for instance in an exhibition format. One could say that Kubelka’s working approach is personal. In fact, it does repeatedly become clear how strongly the plane of very deep personal experience becomes inscribed into her artwork during the creative process, seeking qualification precisely here. As a form of constant self-questioning. At the same time, this idea of working “in and of itself” is already eminently political: as form of insistence on the autonomy as an artistically inclined subject, beyond cycles of use in which the work is engaged, when it becomes public.
In the case of the exhibition jointly developed here, the artist used the invitation to provocatively thwart the mechanisms of exhibition production. She did so by channelling “foreign” works into the exhibition—works by people who work artistically but would themselves never be able to find a place for presenting their artwork in our context. So while the artist, on the one hand, herself decided on the unsaleability of her work, she used her invitation to participate in an institutional context, on the other, to gain access to a space for those who can hardly garner visibility for their artistic work. But the subversiveness of her activity does not end here. It goes beyond Friedl Kubelka’s idea to integrate “foreign” works in the exhibition to actually have them be sold in an a(u)ction initiated by her, thus offensively marking them as “saleable”. With the aim of also ascribing value to these works—value that, of course, is also reflected by a price. With the aim of providing the artist-patients with a wage for their work. And with the aim of becoming more concrete and showing appreciation towards the Atelier d’Expression in the Senegalese city of Dakar and the artists working there in a way that is more than just ideational.

 

Gan Jah (Ndiaga Ndiaye), Le monde qui pleure, 2015.

 

Salvatore Viviano selling art in the frame of the a(u)ction “Buy Art from the Atelier d’Expressiom”, initiated by Friedl Kubelka and Georg Gröller, performed by Salvatore Viviano, music by Ibou Ba, 10.6.2016, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition: Friedl Kubelka: Atelier d’Expression (Dakar), Camera Austria, Graz. Photo: Alessio Eberl.

 

inside/outside: Speaking about the Art of Outsiders [1]

If we consider the artwork by Senegalese artists introduced in the exhibition as the work of patients visiting a psychiatric institution, then we can localise them in the context of discourse on so-called “Outsider Art”. But does this achieve anything?
Today Outsider Art is used as an established concept of style, as if it actually denoted a specific style analogous to other genres. But those who take a more in-depth look will note that the works by the various artists subsumed here are hardly related. So what might Outsider Art really be? Indeed, it is not a style, it does not encompass a specific geographic area, it fails to delineate any clear time period, nor does it denote a particular artistic orientation.
So the question is whether a categorisation as Outsider Art is even able to imbue the creators of the artwork with a sense of (new) dignity. Or whether it would conversely serve to once again marginalise or even patronise them? Clearly, the acknowledgement of so-called “Outsider Art” represents a gesture of liberation, which has helped to discover unique works of art. In the case of the works channelled into this specific exhibition context by Friedl Kubelka, it is worthwhile to acknowledge that art can be created in unexpected places, and that its meaning does not necessarily depend on whether the originators are knowledgeable about art and its history—whichever history of art. What counts is the work itself, its aesthetic richness and complexity, the thoughts and references that it formulates, its precision and the risks it takes. The question of “inside” or “outside” is unimportant and debilitating, for it hampers understanding. For example, works of Art Brut have been traditionally treated as examples of “primal” art, existing beyond the confines of time and history. They actually all tell—often more than we would like—°“of a world that we believe to know. Behind superficial unworldliness, they spread out repressed realities, unfold inhibited yearnings, call for promises to be redeemed, and remind of ignored injustices” (Daniel Baumann). The exhibited works speak to all of the above. With the exhibition of Friedl Kubelka, we are leaving the corral in which outsider art has been enclosed and opening ourselves up to their work as art—and solely as art. This is how the artist Friedl Kubelka introduces it to us. And just as Friedl Kubelka has given the artist-patients names and is showing them as creative personalities in her photographs, now we can try to encounter them and their works in an open and unbiased way. Still, it remains to be seen as to whether we will succeed in this without stylising them as foreign matter or allowing them to degenerate into a symptom—not only in this project, but everywhere that we come into contact with so-called “Outsider Art”.

 

Friedl Kubelka, Gan Jah (Ndiaga Ndiaye), 2015/16.

 

… and even Africa!

We won’t be able to avoid sticking our European eyes onto these images and adjust to the works with the trained gaze of our European, art-historical education—though with the knowledge that these artworks were created in a context in which we are not sure on which aesthetic concepts they are founded. We can try to place them in the context of their origination, that is, to criss-cross it with our knowledge about colonial history, interveined with racism, about the relations between Europe and the West African region. In 2001, Okwui Enwezor substantiated the reception of African modernity with “The Short Century”. A comparison of the photographs in our exhibition with his research results may be well worth one’s while, opening up new contexts—of course, without the intrinsic association between liberation and penalisation, idealisation and delimitation, so typical for modern times.

 

Friedl Kubelka, untitled, 2015/16.

 

Friedl Kubelka, Papisto Boy (Pape Mamadou Samb, 1951–2015): Peinture Murale (Peter Tosh, Zone Industrielle, Dakar), 2015/16.

 

Risk

During a period in which both the production of and discourse on contemporary art are permeated by re-feudalisation and eventisation, and in which the important questions of negotiation about the status of contemporary art are finally arriving at the point of debate, and where the establishment or the art market is already adequately supplied—precisely now it is important to embrace projects like that of Friedl Kubelka. Even giving the danger that some ending up—once again—at narrowing down the boundaries of institutions and the concept of art with a critical view. Yet if we venture an assertion, then perhaps we can recognise a dual sense of resistance that is not content with “common sense”. Instead, it repeatedly enables subversive thought and action, pushing through to new spaces in the process. This is a debate that touches on ideological issues. Let us pursue it!

 

 

Notes

1  Many thanks to Daniel Baumann for the information and discussions.Acknowledgement: Alassane Seck (Atelier d’Expression de la Clinique psychiatrique Moussa Diop – Centre Hospitalier National Universitaire de FANN – Dakar – Sénégal), Tapha (Moustapha Sy), Papis (Babacar Gaye), Ousmane Diop, gan-Jah (Ndiaga Ndiaye), Sidibé, Omar Ndiaye, Djim/Salamon (Abdoul Aziz), Charles Njaay, Tall, Faka, Docteur Manchita Gaye (DMG), Georg Gröller, Gudrun Schreiber (Kunstsektion, BKA), Karin Zimmer (Kunstsektion BKA), Gunn Pöllnitz, Fritz Panzer, Salvatore Viviano, Ibou Ba.The exhibition is accompanied by an eponymous publication released by the Edition Camera Austria.

 

Exhibition Folder Friedl KubelkaPoster of the A(u)ction by Friedl Kubelka and Georg Gröller

buy the book accompanying the exhibition

Sven Johne, Anomalien des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts / Einige Fallbeispiele,

Arbeiterkammer Wien, 22.5. – 30.10.2015 (Kat.)

kuratiert von Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sven Johne, Anomalien des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts / Einige Fallbeispiele„Jeden Morgen ein Lächeln“ fällt schwer angesichts des Global Wealth Report der Credit Suisse, der angibt, dass 1% der Weltbevölkerung 48% des globalen Reichtums in ihren Händen hält. Auch mit dem Oxfam-Armutsbericht, der prognostiziert, dass im kommenden Jahr die 1% der Reichsten mehr als die 99% der Anderen besitzen, wird es nicht sonniger. Die Beschleunigung der Ungleichheit in der Vermögensverteilung schlägt sich nicht nur in diesen frappierenden Zahlen nieder, die die Zunahme der „Superreichen“ illustrieren, sondern findet auch in der Mitte der Gesellschaft statt. Nichts scheint mehr sicher, der sozialökonomische Status des Einzelnen ist fragil.

Diese Ungleichheit ist Folie für die von Sven Johne* entwickelte Arbeit „Anomalien des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts“. Seine „Fallbei-spiele“ sind Ausdruck gesellschaftlicher Fragmentierung. Mit seinen reportageartigen Berichten gibt er Einblicke in die Isolation von gesellschaftlichen Absteigern, Umsteigern und Aussteigern, aber auch in die Lebensentwürfe ihrer Aufsteiger. Ganz gezielt gibt Sven Johne den Anspruch der Nachweislichkeit seiner Geschichten auf. Vielmehr speisen sich seine „Fallbeispiele“ aus Zitaten, Parodien und Anspielungen sowie aus frei Erfundenem, mit denen sowohl die Biografien von Gewinnern wie auch die von Verweigerern, Aktivisten, Aufsässigen und die von den gänzlich Unfreien – ob arbeitslos, obdachlos oder arm – zu je genau diesem unausweichlichen Punkt zuzulaufen scheinen, den Johne in den „Anomalien“ aufnimmt. Viele seiner Geschichten erscheinen vollkommen absurd, keine jedoch unglaubhaft. Ihr Aberwitz führt direkt in die irgendwie auch stimulierende Abgründigkeit der Gegenwart. Offen bleibt, inwieweit das faktische Auseinanderdriften der Gesellschaft einem erweiterten Möglichkeitsraum der Postmoderne geschuldet ist, die durch die Erosion einengender Werte und Moralvorstellungen wie durch zunehmende „Individualisierung“ dem Einzelnen neue Optionen ermöglicht – oder aber ob sich unter dem Druck kalter neoliberaler Durchkapitalisierung der Zwangs- charakter des „Sich-neu-Erfinden-und-Abfinden-Müssens“ durchsetzt.

Mit den „Fallbeispielen“ aus den „Anomalien des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts“ fügt Sven Johne in rund 70 Berichten und 90 dazugehörenden Porträtfotografien (ohne dass diese unmittelbar eindeutig zuzuordnen sind) die „Fragmentierten“ wieder zusammen. Je nach Lesart erinnern sie an den „Mitarbeiter des Monats“, an die „Straße der Besten“ oder schlicht an Fahndungsplakate. Eine neue Form der Gesellschaftlichkeit ergibt sich damit freilich nicht. Vielmehr reflektiert dieses Projekt mit seiner düsteren Komik die Folgeerscheinungen eines Gegenwartskapitalismus, der sich als „vernünftig“, „rational“ und „alternativlos“ beschreibt, dem aber zusehends das „Gemeinwohl“ abhandenkommt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Einladung_AKKunstprojekte_SvenJohne.pdf

Homepage Sven Johne

 

 

 

 

 

Erik van der Weijde, Gebilde

Camera Austria, Graz. 6.12.2014 – 15.2.2015.  (cat.)

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erik van der Weijde, Gebilde

by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

To date, the extensive work of Dutch artist Erik van der Weijde has primarily come to our attention in the form of his artist books, zines, and, more recently, also his magazine called SUBWAY. The photographer has presented more than forty publications over the last twelve years, released by his own publishing company 4478zine or in cooperation with the most prominent independent publishers, including Roma Publications, Rollo Press, Super Labo, and Kaugummi Books. Van der Weijde approaches his topics with great conceptual clarity. The idea as catalyst for copious research; the process of photographing on site (at least in black and white) without undue effort yet with strong precision; the concise selection of pictures during the process of constellating series; the reduction of text to dry information; the production process of making a book, including design, typography, selection of format and paper; the printing technique and binding specific to each book; and finally, the distribution via his own publishing house or via partners from the publishing and distribution sector. Each individual aspect of book-making is founded on precisely calculated decisions related to form and content and is subject to visual monitoring and strategic decisions. Instead of telling stories, Van der Weijde’s work is propelled by remaining embedded in the visual and by arriving at thematic strategies in precisely this sphere.

Erik van der Weijde’s photographic practice is therefore closely linked to his sweeping editorial and publishing practice, with his artwork virtually becoming ordered through the production of zines and books. However, his editing and publishing efforts most especially serve to facilitate the “reading” of his images, which are committed to an unfalsifying documentary style.
It is no coincidence that his upcoming project scheme of creating a comprehensive publication to chronicle the last twelve years of his publishing pursuits as a kind of dérive coincides with increased exhibition activity. This has arisen from his desire to more clearly impart the cosmological context of his image complexes—and to present, more strongly than before, that which has evolved in terms of form and content into individual work series (and therefore into zines and artist books) as an artistic project that brings these photographs together.

When we reflect on the artist books by Erik van der Weijde with his “4478Zine Publishing Manifesto” in mind—which meanwhile contains fourteen simply yet precisely phrased paragraphs—a renewed connection to the strategies of 1960s Conceptual Art readily becomes apparent: departure from the individual image, creating work series, commitment to a documentary style, the ostensible banality of what is captured, bowing to a research-based idea, the book as art form and democratic medium. All of these basic principles are found to be quite accurately honoured in Van der Weijde’s publications. They should thus most definitely be viewed in relation to the type of artist book established by Ed Ruscha. Each of his books is dedicated to a particular subject, none of which seem to relate to the others, for example, housing settlements erected in Nazi Germany, car crashes, animals, portraits of mother and son in staged and re-enacted family photos, corruption in Brazilian politics, found pictures of tanks, firearms, fighter planes, and bonsai plants, prostitution, street lanterns designed by Albert Speer, mighty trees in ominous places, his son sleeping, his mother-in-law in a domestic setting, the Amsterdam canals viewed from a boat, recurring elements in everyday Brazilian culture, Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, or the VW Beetle. All of these things encountered in the work of Erik van der Weijde not only share, in equal measure, universal validity; they also lay claim to what is admittedly a quite difficult-to-grasp “meaning” that alludes to an underlying something. This is indicated by the artist’s strategic decision to compile, from the outset, his zines and books into series on a regular basis and to then present them as parts of a greater whole.

The exhibition at Camera Austria, which has been developed in close collaboration with the artist, is thus pursuant to the concept of uncoupling his pictures from the carrier material of the book page and attempting a different approach to viewing and seeing (and also a different act of haptically experiencing) his images—as photographs. Also pursued is the idea of carving out the nature of equality of his different motif worlds as the conceptual nucleus of his work. The order that has evolved in Erik van der Weijde’s work through the publishing of books, each dedicated to a different thematic area, dissipates, as it were, in the exhibition. Rooms separated from each other by two book covers are opened so that the photographs respectively shown there wander out—as if originating in an archive—to form a monumental table sculpture. It is here that the images become re-disseminated in a different way so as to create a new “Gebilde” that is both incomplete and non-completable. One of Van der Weijde’s special skills is to assemble contradictory elements in all of his pictures, be it in portraits of his wife Ana and his son Caetano or prostitutes along the beach, in a photograph of a towering tree at the grave of Adolf Hitler’s parents, or in an image showing cattle ready for slaughter, in pictures of public rubbish bins or the representational architecture of Brazil—elements that are familiar and alien, banal and exceptional, absurd and normal, tragic and comical, allowed and forbidden, innocent and guilty, full of love and desire all at the same time. In his photographs, Erik von der Weijde services forms of visuality that allow beholders to see and watch, and perhaps also to recognise how all of these things interrelate, are mutually dependent, and also become situated in these particular contexts.

On the heels of exhibitions by Wolfgang Tillmans (2007), Annette Kelm (2009), Tobias Zielony (2011), Sven Johne (2013) and Joachim Koester (2014) this show at Camera Austria is likewise the first international solo presentation of the artist in Austria.

 

On the occasion of this exhibition a text book is published in the Edition Camera Austria.
Erik van der Weijde: Gebilde. Ed. by Maren Lübbke-Tidow, with contributions by Pierre Dourthe, Frits Gierstberg, Maren Lübbke-Tidow. Dan Rule, Erik van der Weijde, Jan Wenzel (ger. / eng. / fre. / ndl.). Edition Camera Austria, Graz 2014. 96 pages, 11,3 cm x 17 cm, 6 b/w illustrations.
ISBN 978-3-902911-12-4, € 9,90buy this book: Erik van der Weijde, Gebilde

 

 

Erik van der Weijde (b. 1977 in Dordrecht) studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, both in Amsterdam. Since 2003 he has published over thirty-five books and zines, either under his own imprint 4478zine.com or with other renowned publishers, such as ROMA Publications and Rollo-Press. Van der Weijde currently lives and works in both Brazil and The Netherlands and is represented by Chert Gallery, Berlin.

 

Homepage Erik van der Weijde 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Folder accompanying the exhibition Erik van der Weijde: Gebilde

Jochen Lempert, o.T. (Poem), 2014. Installation View Camera Austria, Redaktion Berlin, Kunstquartier Bethanien.

 

 

Unexpected Encounters

with “Ogms” (Sofia: Kamen Stoyanov, Ivan Moudov, with / in Zusammenarbeit mit Nemanja Cvijanović, Anetta Mona Chisa &Lucia Tkáčová, Pravdoliub Ivanov); “Beirut” (Kairo: Jens Maier-Rothe, Sarah Rifky, Antonia Alampi, Habiba Effa, with /  in Zusammenarbeit mit Malak Helmy, Hassan Khan, Mada Masr, Jasmina Metwaly); “Kontekst collective”, (Belgrad, with / in Zusammenarbeit mit Nina Höchtl, KURS, Bojana Piškur & Ðorđe Balmazović)

Camera Austria, Graz, 22.9. – 17.11.2013

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun 

 

 

Unexpected Encounters

In the exhibition series “Art Is Concrete”, put on by Camera Austria in co-production with the steirische herbst festival 2012, the focus was trained on questions addressing the relationships among art, truth, and politics. Here art was contrasted as a counter-theory and counter-assertion with the leitmotif of the festival, “Truth Is Concrete”: for it is art—where that which is being produced, shown, negotiated, challenged, concealed, or invented becomes fragile, transient, or even dubious—that first and foremost makes a claim to something concrete: a challenge, an imposition, a distur- bance, but also a pleasure, a performance, an act of recognition. It is not because art might be situated beyond power and politics that it emerges as the system of description that is concrete, authoritative, real, genuine, vivid, palpable (all synonyms of the word “concrete”), well before something like truth has a chance to assert re- levance. On the contrary: it is precisely because its stage represents the controversial terrain where meanings about art are construed and negotiated, something that essentially can become conscious (and ultimately represented)—and because the roles, the functions, the arrangement of the various segments of society, history, et cetera, as well as the “whatever« subjects (G. Agamben) are subject to negotiation instead of being presupposed to be fixed—that we are dealing with a space of authoritativeness, of vividness, of reality.

Against this background—and considering the focus on photographic projects—the aim was also to show the extent to which image production, or strategies of representation, does not solely have to involve visuality, and that it cannot primarily be evaluated according to the question of the relationship between picture and “reality”, regardless of the form this takes. If images have always occupied political territory, then it is surely precisely because, as “documents”, they simultaneously set “discourse” into motion, because they are positioned exactly at the junction between what is visible and what is expressible—“a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation” (W. J. T. Mitchell). The exhibition series “Art Is Concrete” engendered a space that was designed to foster an opportunity to encounter, through representation, the most divergent facets of such materialising antagonisms.

Camera Austria would like to follow up on these explorative questions in the context of the steirische herbst festival 2013: with the leitmotif “Liaison Dangereuses”, the festival is putting up for negotiation the many—necessary? strategic, transitory, precarious— alliances and cooperative relationships that come to life “after the revolution”, with an aim to conceptualise and pursue both artistic and cultural—and, most especially, political—“production” under altered conditions. Which political spaces have now opened up? Which still remain contested or are in danger of quickly disappearing again? Have new players become established? Has the capacity to act newly shifted among the players? Who is starting to write the story of such upheaval, applying it to a new societal order? Which continuities and discontinuities are taking effect? How can artistic practices even succeed in translating the complex political, institutional, and social antagonisms into a materiality of representation? In other words, which role might concepts of representation play?

How can the dichotomy of the question of representation be resolved? The latter question is addressed by the St. Petersburg group Chto Delat as follows: “In the present situation, where anti-representational strategies dominate both within the new political movements and in politically engaged art, it seems that the entire debate is reducible to a clear and simple scheme: representation equals hierarchy and is thus bad. The corresponding antithesis is that a rejection of representation equals the absence of hierarchy and is thus a good thing.” Does the only answer to this question imply departing from the spaces of art to become active “in real life”? Or is it conceivable to transform the spaces of art to make room there for negotiating common affairs?

The title “Unexpected Encounters” is a metaphor for the attempt to convert, over the course of eight weeks, the institutional space of Camera Austria into a realm of unexpected exploration of these questions, which may initially be characterised by misjudgements, inappropriate assumptions, and dubious cultural differences. A number of initiatives and groups from various countries—whose “revolutions” and political/societal upheaval at times dates back over ten years or more—are invited to start developing the format for a transfer in collaboration with Camera Austria:
How can these political issues be transferred into the realm of cultural production without replacing political aspects with cultural ones and thus making them disappear? “How is it, then, possible to produce a critical stance within this context? Moreover, how is it possible to develop emancipatory strategies in the field of art and cultural production? Well, there is no simple answer to this question. The contemporary institution of culture is a battlefield, and—to paraphrase Foucault—since there is no power without the resistance(s), each position is an outcome of struggle. What we can do and what we are trying to do is to arti- culate those points of resistance by intervening within the existing constellation. But, criticism as the discursive form of an intervention in the ‘public sphere’ can only be a starting point. Critique—a veritable materialist critique—in order to be efficient, i.e., to produce effects in the material reality of the social exchange, must be practical—it must intervene within and strive to tackle the existing and ongoing social practices” (prelom kolektiv).

Indeed, how can the insistence on deferring the realignment and the discontinuance of options be maintained, which made possible the unexpected spaces of resistance, where the state of exception has already passed and a collective desire for normalisation is giving rise to new myths of order, history, and identity? Which pictures are associated with this desire for normalisation? And which opportunities can be devised to delay the naturalisation of these pictures?

 

Sven Johne, Where the sky is darkest, the stars are brightest

Camera Austria, Graz, 8.6. – 1.9.2013

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun

 

Sven Johne, Empire, 2004, from the series: Ship Cancellation.

Courtesy: Galerie KLEMM´S, Berlin.

 

Where the sky is darkest, the stars are brightest

For many years now, the multifaceted field of documentary photography and its interlinkage with texts, information, stories and history has taken center stage in Sven Johne’s photographic practice. In his works—often based on research on site—he systematically deals with the relationship between what can be experienced and known and what can be shown and communicated about it. In the process, it becomes clear time and again that documentary images are not exclusively an element of the visible but that a fundamental dependence on words and knowledge is inscribed in them—that a shift in the status of the images, an uncertainty with regard to their possibilities of producing meaning is the result.

For his first extensive solo presentation in Austria, the artist combines a selection of works from recent years with new projects which pinpoint this precarious, controversial and increasingly questioned space of “documentality” (Hito Steyerl) of the visual in the world of today. In this respect, the exhibition project focuses on the specific practices and methods in which Sven Johne involves the photographic image in different projects in different places: the claim for reportage, the interest in marginal events, the missing of representation, the gap between text and image—whereby the artist outlines an essential contribution to the current debate circling around the documentary.

 

Installation View Sven Johne Where the sky is darkest, the stars are brightest, Camera Austria 2013. Photo: Tobias Ehrhardt.

 

For his most recent “Griechenland-Zyklus” (Greek Cycle), Sven Johne has traveled to different mainland places and islands in Greece since 2012 which can also be found in any tourist brochure (Syntagma Square in Athens, Mykonos, Delphi, Corinth, Corfu etc.). He took a photo of the starry night sky in all of these places— then he noted down date, time and place, and added a diary entry to each photo: “25 August 2012, 02:08 am, Chora, Mykonos Island: And here they are moored, the yachts of the tax fugitives, says the taxi driver, what affluence! Does Mykonos still belong to Greece? The two of us have fun. But the harbor is going to be privatized in the very near future. Downtown luxury shops, jewelry and expensive hotels. I can’t find a room. Finally, at two in the morning, I am ready to pay any price.”

Separately, all elements of this project—the places, the photos, and the texts—do not aim at anything essential: On site, there isn’t any truth to be discovered, or any crucial and exemplary representation to be wrested from any individual specific presence. Moreover, the lower part of the glazing of the prints shown in the exhibition is covered by a silkscreen surface, where the visitors can read the associated diary entry. Hence, also the last possibility to identify an actual place on the basis of details of landscapes or buildings is made impossible and masked out by this text box.

 

18. September 2012, 20:41 Uhr, Skouries-Stratoni
Der Wachmann schaut misstrauisch, als ich meine Kamera neben der Goldmine aufbaue. Ein Anschlag im Ort verrät: die Mine gehört seit letztem Jahr zu 95 Prozent einem kanadischen Bergbauunternehmen. Seit einigen Monaten immer wieder Proteste der lokalen Bevölkerung. Es ist die ertragreichste Förderstätte Griechenlands. Das Land ist reich. / The guard looks suspicious as I set up my camera near the goldmine. A flyer in the village reveals that the site is now 95-percent owned by a Canadian mining company. For months there have been local protests. It’s the most profitable mine in all of Greece. The land is rich.

 

Sven Johne, Stratoni, 2013, aus der Serie: Griechenland-Zyklus. Courtesy: Galerie KLEMM´S, Berlin.

 

17. September 2012, 22:17 Uhr, Agios GermanosEin abgelegenes Bergdorf im Prespa-Nationalpark, unwegsames Grenzgebiet, im Westen Albanien, im Norden Mazedonien. Die Landschaft urzeitlich. Im Ort nur eine Pension, vier Zimmer, mit Kamin. Abends vor der Tür, es ist ganz still da draußen, ich kann mein Herz schlagen hören. Der Wirt sagt mir später: ich habe Angst vor dem nächsten Winter. / A remote mountain village in the Prespa National Park, impassable border territory. To the west, Albania. To the north, Macedonia. Primevel landscape. There is but one guesthouse in town—four rooms, with fireplaces. Evening by the front door, it’s totally silent out there. I can hear my heart beat. The owner tells me later: I am scared of the next winter.

Sven Johne, Agios Germanos, 2013, from the series: Griechenlandzyklus. Courtesy: Galerie KLEMM´S, Berlin.

 

In this new work, Sven Johne continues a strategy which can also be spotted in other works presented in the exhibition—”Großmeister der Täuschung” (2005), “Ship Cancellation” (2004), or “Ostdeutsche Landschaften” (2005)—and which could be described as the simulation of documentary reportage. Simulation insofar as the individual starting points of interest—unusual public acts and personal fates, shipwrecks, the effects of the crisis in Greece—cannot be retrieved in a comprehensible and coherent project background but are for the most part juxtaposed in unexpected ways (the Wehrmacht massacre of Kalavryta in 1943, the African peddlers in Patras, an innkeeper in Agios Germanos etc.). Moreover, even these individual actual events and encounters are not translated into figurative representation: What is shown is neither the peddlers nor Syntagma Square but always only the starry night sky, with a superimposed text, which also rather links disparate details to the image than comments on it or integrates it in a superordinate narrative.

It is local events, moments of stepping out of order, which attract the artist’s attention and from which he builds a mosaic of details. It is under the starry night sky as a metaphor for order and navigation where he staged these incoherent details, like an odyssey that requires cunning to reach one’s destination. What we get from the laboratory of the neoliberal annihilation of an entire country is only pictures of its night sky and the artist’s anecdotes from his trips. Hence, the future is more than uncertain, and this work presents ambivalent motifs between aberration, hope and salvation.

What has been created is a reportage whose form pretends to act like reportage. And it is more than anything else this “dissonance” between the image and its meaning, between the image and the “event”, the shift between what can be seen and what can be said, what the text ‘shows’, which reveals the fundamental ambivalence between “discourse” and “document” inherent in the documentary: Documentary images were put under general suspicion already a long time ago, their truthfulness was dismissed, and our trust in what they show disappeared. Nevertheless, these documentary images are proliferating more than ever within a large number of media environments.

It is by separating the elements which must meet in order to link an image to any specific meaning that Sven Johne exhibits his specific examination of the documentary. In this way he provides an important contribution to opening up possibilities; to conceiving new linkages to meaning by means of images, especially documentary ones; to introducing a basically open space of meaning production which can be understood as a space for other visual politics.

Stefanie Seufert & Stefan Panhans, Objects & Items

Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna, 18.1. – 5.3.2013

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

Stefan Panhans, Items for Possible Videosets #21, 2009.

 

Objects & Items

Stefan Panhans and Stefanie Seufert are referring in their works with a striking preciseness to iconographic conventions: They quote the genre of still- life, as well as object – and studio – photography, and set links to architectural- and landscape – photography that complete both wide photographic oeuvres. Working with a methodically very strict formalistic approach, high image sharpness, neutral light and a objective camera angle, both artists aim for a kind of hyperpresence of the real, a hyperpresence of the factual. Through subtle signs or interventions in the process of exposure (Seufert) or through the way the objects and items are combined to each other (Panhans), the photographed sujets appear simultaneously ambivalent: The artists combine their works with an enormously fine sense for formal correspondence or compose them as serial sequences, so that they elude a direct readability, on the contrary: Though everything in their photographs is presented always in a neutral- factual way and without any effort of staging, the motifs seem enigmatic (Seufert), mannered or partly exaggerated into a grotesqueness (Panhans).

 

 

 

 

 

Typical for Stefanie Seufert ́s works are the visual easily comprehensible, nevertheless aesthetically hybrid constructions of the image-space and within this the subtle directed presence of the object, as well as the revealing of the photographic process. Here one can see her reconceiving and comparing approach of rethinking photography as an ostensibly objectifying method of representation.

The spectators of her object-studies are left uncertain about the actual nature of the photographed objects, about the nature of the gorgeous conifers (2006/2007) with their complete record of cultural traditions, or about the nature of the leftovers from a consumer ́s world that are presented in “things without a name” (2012), therefore about things that even do not have a name, that have never been signified. The objects that Stefanie Seufert found and photographed seem to be equally strange as well as emblematic. Seufert is thwarting with those images the emphatic faith in the objective exposure that is dominating the genre since it ́s emergence in the 1920s: “By relying entirely on the chance (and the changing) appearance of the things and the openness of how they can be interpreted, Stefanie Seufert ́s works resist the concept of a complete domination of the image, muss less a domination of information.” (Florian Ebner) The strict orientation towards formal criteria, like the visual reduction, the negation of narration and the decision for a pure object- oriented representation, is filling the images with a mannered presence. This strategy is emphasising the hybrid character of her photographs that lead beyond the actual point of seeing and understanding to the oscillating boarder between vision and comprehension.

 

 

 

 

 

The enigmatic finding of the motif and the formalistic strictness that is characteristic for Stefanie Seufert ́s way of working is typical for Stefan Panhan ́s photographic praxis as well. Contrary to the visual structure of isolation that is obtained by Seufert through the depleting of the image-space, Panhans is working towards an extreme exposure of outwardness and is initiating scenic narrations (therefore his tableaux vivant like images from his since 2007 ongoing series of works are called “Items for Possible Video Sets”). Panhans is using permanently „out of the stock of a global market”, is referring to pop-culture, fashion, design, advertisement: to various consumeristic worlds. His goods and accessories are set often as threatening signs that are utilised in an adjuratory way and symbolically exaggerated. The images are revealing the reverse and the unconscious of the surrounding consumeristic world. His wall-filling installation “Concrete Run” (2012), that is on display now in Vienna and that is a combination of the series “Items for Possible Video Sets” and some works without a title, is full of stimulations for the demand of consume, even if: “the beautiful view on the luxurious design and the good form is over. It ́s art from the era of the financial crisis, the criminal hedge- fonds, the crash of the banks, the failure of the climate agreement, of the salary dumping, that is part of global markets. (…) The cute mesentery is a symbol for zeitgeist. The microphysics of the power of goods consists of aesthetic decoys and details.” (Giselinde Nabakowski)

Even if the visual index, to which the photographs of Stefan Panhans and Stefanie Seufert refer to, are partly different – the dryness and the sometimes denying character of Seufert ́s photographs are contrasting with the strange and abysmal items of Panhans – their works have a laconic- ironic base in common, that both use to work towards a subtle manipulation of an alleged transparent view on the realness of things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homepage Stefan Panhans

Homepage Stefanie Seufert

Michael Schmidt, Berlin nach 1945

Arbeiterkammer Wien, 24.5. – 30.10.2012

kuratiert von Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

Eine Sprache entwickeln.

Die Arbeit von Michael Schmidt* „Berlin nach 45“ ist anders als seine Werkserien „Waffenruhe“ (1985–1987), EIN-HEIT (1991–1994) oder aktuell „Lebensmittel“ (2006–2010) kein über Jahre angelegtes Projekt, sondern entstand in einem vergleichsweise kurzen Zeitraum: über die Dauer des Jahres 1980. Für die Arbeiterkammer hat Michael Schmidt Auszüge aus dieser seriellen Arbeit zu einem sich über die sechs Wände des Foyers erstreckenden Band entwickelt, in dem sich ohne Weißraum Bild an Bild reiht, unterbrochen nur durch die vorgegebene Architektur, Fenster und Türdurchgänge. Eine Präsentationsweise seiner Bilder in Form einer Tapete hat er erstmalig für seine Retrospektive in München 2010 gewählt. Eine immer wieder neue Sprache seiner Bilder zu entwickeln, sich einen immer wieder neuen Zugang zu seinen Themen zu erlauben – durch immer wieder neue Zusammenstellungen und Formate, sowie durch das Ausprobieren neuer Formen der Ausbelichtung und Rahmensetzungen – ist eine der herausragenden Quali-täten dieses „Œuvres in Graustufen“. Obwohl Berlin das beherrschende Sujet seiner Bilder insgesamt ist, geht es weder hier noch in anderen Bildern um Formen der Dokumentation von Stadt. Schmidt ist vielmehr dem Thema Zeit verpflichtet, Berlin dient als Chiffre: Die Zeit und ihre Geschichte mäandert durch seine Bilder, sie verläuft nicht linear, sondern in Brüchen und Sprüngen, erlaubt Vorwärtsbewegungen und Rückblenden. Dies wird allein schon mit dem Titel speziell zu dieser Serie (Berlin nach 45) angegeben, mit dem sich ein Graben zu ihrem Entstehungsjahr (1980) auftut. Geschichte, immer auch eine Geschichte von Trennung und Teilung sowie ihrer ideologischen Verbrämungen, wird also mit Schmidts Bildern produktiv gemacht als etwas, dass unabgeschlossen und unabschließbar ist: „Mehr Fragen stellen als Antworten geben“, sagt er dazu. Eine aufgeregte Raumorganisation oder dramatische Inszenierung findet man bei Schmidt nicht. Im Gegenteil: Schmidt ist weit weg von klassischen Architekturaufnahmen – er unterläuft geradezu deren Darstellungskonventionen –, sondern geht viel weiter: Er zeigt die Brüche, Risse, Narben und Nahtstellen von Stadt, die sich zu einem (oftmals dysfunktionalen, aber immer sozialen) Organismus zusammenfügen. Herausragend erscheint die immer wieder neue Aktualität seiner inzwischen schon beinahe historisch zu nennenden Aufnahmen: Angesichts der zunehmenden Gentrifizierung nicht nur des städtischen Raums Berlins mit seinen vielen baulichen, politischen und sozialen Folgen, erscheinen die Fotografien aus „Berlin nach 45“ als re-aktualisiertes Bild einer Stadt im steten, brutalen Wandel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos: Hertha Hurnaus

http://akkunst-schmidt.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tobias Zielony, Manitoba

Camera Austria, Graz, 8.7. – 4.9.2011

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun

 

 

 

 

Tobias Zielony, Manitoba

The erosion of the documentary with regard to its ability to describe reality has become apparent in the past twenty years and has even reached mass-media reporting. The world has become photographic, but “the more unhindered its dissemination, the more diverse its forms, the more powerful its effect, the stronger, too, the suspicion of deception that has always been cast on the image and images” (Jean-Luc Nancy). So what can the reality-based representational media such as photography and film tell us about the world today? How does an increasingly visualised culture assure itself of its reality, its ground, when image and reality are constantly constructing and commenting on each other more than ever before? The aim of this project developed in co-operation with the photo artist Tobias Zielony (born in Wuppertal in 1973, lives in Berlin) is to explore these interdependencies and to focus on and assess the current role of various documentary (artistic) strategies.

Tobias Zielony’s work always combines social reality with protagonists, with fields of action of social individuals. But what picture does his documentary practice draw of these social individuals? Tobias Zielony has gained renown in recent years with series on young people from Europe and the USA; his pictures exemplarily pose this question as to the subject production of documentary photographic images, as to what photography still does with the people it depicts. Together with Tobias Zielony, we are developing an exhibition that, with the aid of additional contributions, including film and literature, explores this terrain of the documentary as a space of action from the perspective of a performativity of images.

In parallel to the exhibition we have collaborated with Tobias Zielony on a thematic issue of the magazine  Camera Austria International 114 / 2011 in which we explore the issue of the documentary as political practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zielony_Ausstellungsfolder

Peggy Buth, Das Blaue vom Himmel

Arbeiterkammer Wien, 3.12.2010 – 20.5.2011

kuratiert von Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

Peggy Buth, Das Blaue vom Himmel (Mit Edmund Hillary durch den Himalaya, Abbildung Seite 24: „Fromme Hindus pilgern zum 3901 m hoch gelegenen Shiva-Heiligtum in der Berghöhe von Armanath“), Pigment Print, Dibond, dimension variable, 2010.

Mein Entwurf für die Arbeiterkammer Wien zeigt Ihnen sechs blaue Flächen. Die Vorlage für die Farbflächen sind Ausschnitte aus Reisekatalogen. Die ausschnitthaften Re-Fotografien reduzieren die jeweilige Bildvorlage auf die Abbildung der Himmelsfläche. Der blaue Himmel gilt als Projektionsfläche für Sehnsüchte, Wünsche und Versprechen. Zeichen dafür ist seine aufdringliche Präsenz in Reisekatalogen oder in Fotobüchern von Expeditionen und Reisebeschreibungen ferner Länder. Redensarten wie Das Blaue vom Himmel versprechen oder auch Das Blaue vom Himmel herunterlügen verweisen auf das Trügerische dieser Wünsche und Versprechen. In diesem Zusammenhang erscheint der blaue Himmel als Projektionsfläche, die über gesellschaftliche Realitäten hinwegtäuscht. In der Arbeit wird diese Funktion repräsentiert durch Farbflächen, die sich auf den zweiten Blick als Abbild, als Reproduktionen und Rasterauflösungen zeigen. Das Trügerische der Realitätsflucht findet seine Form im Druckraster. Es offenbart das Sehnsuchtsbild als Imitation, als Nachahmung, als Ersatz.  Peggy Buth 

 

 

 

Wenn man über kulturelles Engagement in der Arbeiterkammer sprechen will, dann wird schnell klar, dass dieses im Idealfall an die Kernaufgaben dieser öffentlichen Institution gebunden bleiben sollte: Hier kommen Menschen aus unterschiedlichen Lebensbereichen zusammen, die Fragen aus der Arbeitswelt besprechen – Anlass für die deutsche Künstlerin Peggy Buth* den Tugenden und Unbilden der Arbeit ein Bild entgegenzusetzen, dass mit dem Begriff der Arbeit untrennbar verbunden ist und gleichsam seinen Gegenpol bildet: das Bild der Freizeit.

Peggy Buth wählt dafür das irdisch-entrückte Sehnsuchtsmotiv Himmel. In unterschiedlichen Farbschattierungen zieht er auf den sechs Wänden im Eingangs- und Wartebereich der Arbeiterkammer in monumentaler Größe und mit maximaler Tiefenwirkung die Blicke auf sich. Die jeweiligen Titel der Arbeiten geben einen Hinweis darauf, dass Peggy Buth die Himmelsmotive nicht in freier Natur, sondern in mittlerweile historischen Abenteuerromanen und Reisekatalogen gefunden hat – Bücher und Prospekte, die oftmals kolonial inspiriert sind, (europäische) Imaginationen des Fremden und Exotischen, Druckwerke also, die verborgene Begehren wecken und Expeditions- bzw. Eroberungsphantasien wachrufen. Die Ausschnitte, die Peggy Buth aus diesen Vorlagen ausgewählt und re-fotografiert hat, zeigen an, dass diese Bilder Konstruktionen sind, die Vergrößerung ins Monumentale führt das Blau des Himmels als Surrogat vor: in manchen Büchern und Katalogen wurde das Blau des Himmels gar nachträglich hinzugefügt und handkoloriert. Die monumentalen Vergrößerungen von Peggy Buth führen diesen Konstruktionscharakter in überraschender Klarheit und Präzision vor. Ihre Himmelsmo-tive legen nicht nur die Struktur des Druckrasters offen sowie die haptischen Qualitäten des Papiers und etwa seine Alterungserscheinungen, sie zeigen auch an, mit welchen Strategien und mit welchen Methoden am Repräsentationscha-rakter des (fotografischen) Bildes festgehalten und beständig gearbeitet wurde, um es möglichst glaubhaft vorzuführen. Die Modi der visuellen Repräsentation des Begehrens mit der eigenen forschenden Arbeit sichtbar zu machen, ist eine der grundlegenden Strategien Peggy Buths. In Das Blaue vom Himmel gelingt ihr dies mit großer konzeptueller Strenge und Einfachheit.

 

Installationsansicht Peggy Buth, Das Blaue vom Himmel, Arbeiterkammer Wien, 2010.

 

Installationsansicht Peggy Buth, Das Blaue vom Himmel, Arbeiterkammer Wien. 2010

 

Installationsansicht Peggy Buth, Das Blaue vom Himmel, Arbeiterkammer Wien. 2010.Photos: Wolfgang Thaler

 

http://akkunst-buth.pdf

Milk Drop Coronet. 30 Exhibitions on the Virtuosity of Thingness

with: Thomas Bayrle, Walead Beshty, Björn Braun, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Natalie Czech, Jeanne Faust, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Aurélien Froment, Sylvia Henrich, Horáková + Maurer, Susan Howe / James Welling, Margarete Jakschik, Annette Kelm, Herwig Kempinger, Heinz Peter Knes, Ernst Koslitsch, Tatiana Lecomte, Jochen Lempert, Ulrike Lienbacher, Lotte Lyon, Eva Maria Ocherbauer, Markéta Othová, Michael Schmidt, Gregor Schmoll, Roman Schramm, Stefanie Seufert, Dirk Stewen, Josef Strau, Barbara Trautmann, Susanne Winterling

Camera Austria, Graz, 26.9.2010 – 9.1.2011

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun

 

 

 

 

Milk Drop Coronet. 30 Exhibitions on the Virtuosity of Thingness

It was in 1957 that Harold Edgerton published that famous photograph of a milk drop splash. There is no time, no impression of weight or gravity in this photograph. The picture captures a moment between motion and standstill, between stability and instability, suspending this transition in time. How does this relationship between stability and instability stand today? How can photographic devices be used to create a picture in which the object world appears to be thrown off balance or shifted in terms of emphasis? How can processes of structural change and transformation be made visible using photography? These questions are resurfacing with increasing frequency in current artistic projects as fundamental questions of form, connected with debates on possible links to aesthetic projects following modernism – for example to New Objectivity with its fixation on structure and form or to surrealistic aesthetics of mystification and metaphorisation of the object world. It would seem to be a matter of representing elementary forms and figurations and their intrinsic fractures: ephemeral phenomena and states that condense into a specific form in an alien and yet emblematic moment. The aim is not the disclosure or aestheticisation of reality but rather to explore the still-disputed question concerning the relation between visibility and reality.

In 30 table-top showcases 30 artists present their exhibition within the exhibition. The limited space emphasises the artists’ experimental handling of their photographic material. For example with silhouettes, double exposures, photocollages and photograms, but also with a marked tendency to remove colour from the photographic image, artists are currently once again favouring those techniques that allow them not only to emphasise forms and figurations in the image, but which also permit, as it were, an atmospheric and exaggerated, speculative representation of the object world. In this sense the exhibited works relate to debates on possible links to aesthetic projects following modernism – for example to New Objectivity with its fixation on structure and form or to surrealistic aesthetics of mystification and metaphorisation of the object world.
The selected artists avail themselves of a method of “unobjective objectivity” whose logic would seem to lie somewhere between concealed allusion and succinct, overt showing, with which they address a constantly renewed handling of classical questions of representation, to which photography remains bound.
Particularly in the visual media, countless unimportant details often prevent us from noticing what is most important – a phenomenon that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “hiding by showing”. For Bourdieu this phenomenon also has political implications, because what is commonplace hides what is important, because the spectacularisation of banality hides the interest in imperceptible changes, and because the world is transformed into an incoherent sequence of incomprehensible snapshots. Or, as Alain Badiou puts it: “It is what orders, in all the arts, the formal principle: the capacity to render visible for everyone what, for the medium and for commerce, and thus also for everyone (…) does not exist.”
Thus, by using their formal devices and with the aid of their images the artists at the exhibition seem to pursue a counter-strategy: they show by hiding – they thus slow down the interpretation of the images and reject a purely superficial orientation based on what is depicted. In a way, they follow Bourdieu’s call to make usual things unusual, to portray them in such a way as to make visible how extraordinary they are – like the milk drop frozen in time in Edgerton’s photo.
One key link to the theme of steirischer herbst 2010 – “Masters, tricksters, bricoleurs” – is the exhibition dispositif of the thirty table-top showcases as thirty “exhibition spaces”: a terrain of showing and seeing that differs markedly from the convention of the white cube and which entangles visitors intimately and distractedly in both the formal and image-political debate through and between the exhibited positions. How much virtuosity must the viewers muster to create the “text” of the exhibition? By oscillating on the thin line between seeing and knowing, history and aesthetics, contingency and emblematism, objectivity and mystification, they also challenge the traditional allocations of photography as a technique of showing and seeing but also, in so doing, the rules of recognition, interpretation and understanding.

Photos: Christian Wachter

Artur Żmijewski: ‘Democracies’ and other works

Camera Austria, Graz, 27.9.2009-17.1.2010

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

Installation View Artur Żmijewski, Democracies and other works, 2009.

 

Artur Żmijewski: ‘Democracies’ and other works

In his artistic practice involving social experimentation with societal fringe groups, Artur Żmijewski has been, over the past ten years, working towards a dissolution of the judgemental concepts with which we construe societal norms and deviation therefrom. One might maintain that a strong fundamental understanding of democracy has already been comprising the basis for this artistic approach, with the establishment of the sovereignty and the integrity of the individual playing a decisive role. The quality of Żmijewski’s artistic work stems from the way it approximates us to the deviant and aberrant while discountenancing a claim to approval, directly appealing to us emotionally and calling for (self-)reflection and also the assertion of a political stance.

 

 

 

 

Annette Kelm

Camera Austria, Graz, 10.7.2009 – 13.9.2009

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annette Kelm, Turning into a Parrot, 2003. C-print, 50 cm x 40 cm.

Courtesy Johann König, Berlin.

 

Annette Kelm

On the heels of initial institutional solo exhibitions held at Witte de With in Rotterdam, in the Kunsthalle Zurich, as well as currently at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, we are presenting the works of Berlin-based artist Annette Kelm (born 1975) for the first time in Austria. Since the wide reception of her work, created in an extended artistic context, has for the most part lacked concentration on medium usage, the exhibition in Graz likewise sets out to draw the work into a photography-specific debate and to explore Kelm’s exceptional employment of her medium.

With poignant precision the artist tackles pictorial conventions using photographic means. She invokes the genre of the still life along with that of object and studio photography, with architectural and landscape images rounding out her comprehensive oeuvre. With a methodically stringent, formalised approach, high image definition, neutral lighting, and an “objective” camera angle, Annette Kelm leverages the subjects and objects of her photographs to a kind of a hyperpresence of the real, to a presence of the factual. Yet through subtle placement the subjects also appear ambivalent due to the manner in which they are combined: for the artist, possessing an acutely refined sense for formal congruities, positions very different objects together, or smuggles “alien” details into seemingly perspicuous motifs. The photographs, which appear temperate and elegant, thus acquire a measure of eccentricity and elude immediate interpretation – on the contrary, the motifs seem obscure. For instance, Annette Kelm places the first e-guitar, a 1934 Rickenbacker model “Frying Pan” (2007), in front of African wax batik fabric with an M.C. Escher-like staircase motif; in the series “Stars Look Back” (2006) she photographs a cubical bamboo table, each time slightly shifted, with shadowings in various directions, in front of graphically patterned cloth. The respectively different lighting of the motif along with the colourfully divergent composition seem to indicate a flawed photographic process that Kelm in this series doesn’t actually correct after the fact but instead openly exhibits, considering her own perfectionism, as effects of the analogue technique. Typical for her work are constructions of pictorial space that are easy to grasp visually but culminate aesthetically in a hybrid manner, a subtly directed objectual presence inherent therein, as well as the making-visible of the photographic process. Evident here is Kelm’s scrutinising and comparative reassessment of the promise of photography as a purportedly objectifying method of representation. Equally apparent, however, is her intention of qualifying photography as a proverbially imaging medium with its own logic. Thus Kelm’s images well-nigh defy, contrary to the initial impression, the classifications of photography and of its traditional scope of use as a documenting, staging, and analysing method of recording. On the contrary: it is a strict working with the image that is not possible without critically questioning conventional access to the medium and undermining the related ascription models.

Kelm’s penchant for the ornamental or the artistry of an object, sometimes even decor, is in some ways inconsistent with the reduced severity of the photographic technique, and yet is still calculated. For precisely this strict orientation toward formal criteria – such as, for instance, abstaining from having details in the surroundings take on a narrative function – and the selection of a purely object-related representational form serve to charge the motif with an almost affected presence. This strategy underlines the hybrid character of her pictures, which transcend purely factual perception and comprehension and oscillate at the margin of perception and knowledge. Kelm is hence at the same time criticising the classical attributions of photography as a technique of exposing and perceiving.

The exhibition in Graz is showing photographs and series from the past ten years. As such, it provides an overview of the wide range of Kelm’s works. Photographs from the artistic beginnings are presented alongside more recent productions. The exhibit selection in this show is thematically associated through a concentration on Kelm’s treatment of pictorial space. For not only is enigmatic motif selection characteristic for her photography – of central importance for her work is likewise the divesting of the pictorial space of its concept and context. In one of her earliest works, “Untitled (ref: leaf)” from the year 1998, she works with the imaging technique commonly used in advertising called the “pack shot” where objects and subjects are depicted without shadow in front of a neutral background. Already apparent here is the formalised austerity with which Annette Kelm would be repeatedly working in order to direct her subjects into a visual structure of isolation. In “Untitled (ref: chimney)” from the year 2001, in turn, she organises – through the photographic technique (flash) and through a mostly uniform colour scheme – the relationship between foreground and background vis-à-vis conventional hierarchies: the objectual presence virtually dissolves here so that the view completely obscures. Nothing else can be signified here and associated with its usual perceptual function; instead, a strongly suggestive effect develops. With this and with subsequently created, comparable works a visual strategy becomes evident that Kelm brings to a climax in her more recent works, such as in the “Big Prints”, which are photographs of generously patterned, opulent furnishing fabrics by the influential American interior designer Dorothy Draper. The pictorial space is reinterpreted as extreme planarity, and Kelm aligns it with the object of representation in one-to-one reproductions: the pictorial space therefore dissipates at the surface while it is, at the same time, just soberly portraying the object after all. Apparent here is Kelm’s systematic, almost radicalised objectivity with which she succeeds, in a totally new way, in circumventing the conventional logics of representation governing the photographic. In the process, photographs of powerful intensity emerge, burgeoning with almost psychedelic impact.

 

Then the work takes place. On the Conceptual Paradigm

with: Marine Hugonnier, Joachim Koester, Sharon Lockhart, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Peter Piller, Hans Schabus, Christopher WilliamsCamera Austria, Graz, 25.4. – 28.6.2009

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then the work takes place. On the Conceptual Paradigm

Contemporary conceptual art has, in recent years, been experiencing a cyclical upturn. Accordingly, in 2006 Camera Austria, with the exhibition “First the artist defines meaning”, presented works by a younger generation of artists who were founding their work on conceptual reflections. Evident here was a fundamental relationship of ambivalence – between image and idea, between the visible and its representation, between methods and meaning – that invited more intensive reflection on this
ambivalent relationship as explored through the current (follow-up) project. After all, the title “Then the work takes place” phrases the completion of Dan Graham’s sentence as stated in the context of deliberations on Sol LeWitt, which references the traditional narrative of historical conceptual art: the focus lies on the primacy of the idea vis-à-vis the work. Precisely this primacy of the idea vis-à-vis the work – of the conceivable and expressible vis-à-vis the sensible – forms the crux of the
explorative questioning by the exhibition “Then the work takes place”. The title (in accentuating the work) already signalises that the images take centre stage as specific aesthetic occurrence and manifestation, that they are not simply pursuing the idea but rather countering the language and the argument – that they are therefore occupying a space in which thought, perception, recognition, experience, and knowledge are brought into new interrelatedness.

 

 

 

 

Prinz Gholam, Aneta Grzeszykowska

Camera Austria, Graz, 14.3. – 18.5.2008.

Opening: 13.3.2008, Performance by Prinz Gholam

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

 

Prinz Gholam, Aneta Grzeszykowska

With Aneta Grzeszykowska and Prinz Gholam two positions are on view that deal with icons of art history. Among other things, Grzeszykowska presents her series of “Untitled Film Stills”, that make reference to Cindy Sherman’s work of the same name. While Sherman’s work initiated feminist-motivated discourses concerning the deconstruction of mythologised portrayals of the feminine, among other things, today her works have become icons themselves. In her analysis and treatment, Grzeszykowska not only raises questions of mastery and originality once again, but also as to whether the game with gender identities opens up a new perspective today. The photographic work and performances of the artist couple Prinz and Gholam, on the other hand – who refer to masterpieces of painting – may be taken as an attempt to live the ideality of painting and, at the same time, to provoke an anarchy of images. Both Aneta Grzeszykowska (PL) and Wolfgang Prinz (D) and Michel Gholam (LB) are presenting their works for the first time in Austria.

 

 

 

 

Installation View Aneta Grzeszykowska / Prinz Gholam (Prinz Gholam).

What We Bought

with: John Armleder, Olaf Breuning, Swetlana Heger, Piotr Uklański, Nicole Wermers, Manfred Willmann

Camera Austria, Graz, 23.9. – 18.11.2007

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

Installation View What We Bought (Olaf Breuning), Camera Austria, Graz.

 

 

What We Bought

In their photography, film but also sculpture projects, the artists invited to the “What We Bought”* exhibition project work with deliberately calculated moments of unreasonableness and going too far. The ostensible detachment in their material-emphasising, often sweeping, extravagant but nevertheless precisely staged representations results from a meticulous observation of the respective immediate living environment: In their concepts, among other things they appropriate the everyday scrap of our consumer culture, making it the basis of their work.
In a refusal to become “productive”, they accumulate pure surface, appropriating those aesthetic phenomena that have become part of our (Western) cultural and consumerist domestication in everyday life. Their works arise from the object worlds of our designed-to-death environment: From meaningless fetishes that already exist, from the mass-produced goods of Western affluent societies, throw-aways obscenely manufactured in the sweatshops of low-wage countries. Rather, beyond a criticism of capitalism (which could also be a fruitful starting-point in this context), the artists are guided in their works by an ostensibly affirmative fascination with the never-ending stream of goods, mass and surface, and associated concepts such as beauty and fetish. However, by working the material in sharp-edged staged shifts, the artists lend a strange hyperpresence of reality to the (often meaningless) things and objects found in the everyday world and focused on in the works. In an attempt to come to terms, the image becomes a vehicle for metamorphoses and fetishisations of our everyday world, in a recourse to carnevalesque methods some of the exhibited works also oppose those economies of the body that strive to make the body “utilisable” for society and to normalise it, “closeness” is experienced as an excessive demand. What gestures are still possible?

* The title “What We Bought” is a reference to the title of the artist?s book by Robert Adams, in which the photographer documents the process of economisation and acceleration in his immediate environment, the Denver Metropolitan Area, from 1970 to 1974.

 

 

 

 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Faltung

Camera Austria, Graz, 6.7. – 9.9.2007

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Faltung

The special thing about Wolfgang Tillmans’ artistic work is not only his use of the single photographic image with its particular formal/compositional properties and qualities, but above all the artist’s method of recombining different images and different subjects to create a kind of display. Both his numerous (artist’s) books previously published and his installations thrive on this “putting in one” of very different pictorial genres. Here, the equality of motifs becomes manifest as a strategy and principle. In Tillmans’ work there is no superficial conceptual-thematic frame that makes a certain ordering of his pictures or specific hanging scheme appear mandatory, on the contrary: Constantly developing new varieties of presentation in which older and newly created photographic material is combined to create ensembles is a leitmotif of his artistic practice.
From the beginning, Wolfgang Tillmans worked parallel in a wide range of media and institutional contexts. At the end of the 1980s, he published series of photos for (lifestyle) magazines, at the same time exhibiting in the gallery context, followed shortly afterwards by shows at international exhibition centres and numerous (artist’s) books and catalogues. These presentations in different media contexts are also interesting in connection with this: Here we see the essence of a profoundly human interest in understanding social experiences or details of reality, to find oneself in them, and to wish to find an image for them. On the other hand, however, we also see the essence of an artistic attitude towards constantly questioning and processing the possibilities and the status quo of art itself through his own work.
In his first solo exhibition in Austria, Wolfgang Tillmans also presents an ensemble of works composed for Camera Austria’s exhibition room that is in keeping with his artistic practice; the ensemble not only demonstrates the whole range of his pictorial themes and motifs but also visualises his interest in the photo as material (that may also be experienced haptically). One focus of the exhibition will be on this aspect in the form of the recent abstract works. Tillmans is interested in the physical processes and different methods that are fundamental in creating a surface structure or image structure: Particularly in his abstract (sometimes cameraless) photography, he thus underscores the materiality of his work and paper as an image carrier of visual perception. The different modes of presentation emphasise the material orientation and the objectual character of his recent works. In the recently created “paper drops”, he widens his focus to this aspect of his work: Here he explores (photo) paper as a cover, as a carrier medium that includes colour.
On the one hand, the experimental aspect that these works may convey represents a constant factor in Tillmans’ photographic work (that began with experiments with different forms of enlargement and reproduction), but must not be viewed as being reduced to this formal aspect. For experimenting with and repeatedly verifying what has been learnt presents itself as a fundamental paradigm of Wolfgang Tillmans’ artistic work: Allowing himself an ever changing approach to his own work and to art is the outstanding quality in this multilayered artistic project. It is an open oeuvre, characterised by constant work on the basis, beyond any grand theorems or finished statements, guided by a “strategy of doubt”. By means of his work, he engages in a form of constant questioning and (self) assurance in which he continues to re-negotiate social, political, religious or genderspecific realities. At the same time, he is also constantly examining the artistic devices, the photography medium itself, with regard to their possibilities, constantly questioning art itself and its possibilities. Although the work is so profoundly conceived as a kind of ongoing test procedure, both in itself and in its interplay with others, Tillmans often surprises by ultimately creating perfectly matched montages of his very different pictures and topics in three dimensions.

 

 

 

 

You Are Here

with : Marika Asatiani, Christoph Grill, Sylvia Henrich, Karina Nimmerfall, Sofija Silvia, Verena Winkelmann, Andrea Witzmann

Camera Austria, Graz, 10.3. – 1.5.2007

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

You Are Here

Landscapes and urban views created en route to the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan reveal traces of political and economic upheaval, that Christoph Grill documents in his travelogues.
Karina Nimmerfall visits supposed crime scenes in New York that play a role in the popular US television series “Law and Order”; in “Cinematic Maps” she contrasts the real places with her fictitious allocations.
Rural scenes photographed in the Zemo Achara region, close to the Turkish border in Georgia, describe almost archetypal types of construction and life-styles, that Marika Asatiani has explored in her “Achara Untitled” project.
Residential buildings in a garden city and their inhabitants, photographed in Skien (Norway) by Verena Winkelmann: Stable, orderly small-town habits in the modern welfare state.
An artificial waterfall in Umbria, the theme of countless idyllic landscape pictures, gives Sylvia Henrich occasion for a project on the relationship of nature as an artificial creation, ideal projection surface, but also energy resource.
Andrea Witzmann presents living space as a variable construction kit with her works created at her Paris studio: In everchanging experimental set-ups, with the aid of the found furnishings, a kind of appropriation process takes place.
The method employed by SofijaSilvia could be described as a meandering movement through space: The photographer as an unnoticed observer, who doesn?t disturb the place she traverses in any way, occupying it only for a short time, and in whose field of vision everything visible enters into a temporary relationship.
Many of the projects presented here have already been published in Camera Austria magazine, that (above all for young artists) has become a trans-local platform beyond local scenes and borders.

 

 

 

 

 

Installation View You Are Here, Camera Austria, Graz. Photo: Manfred Willmann.

 

knowing you, knowing me. On Complicity with Images

with: Thomas Feuerstein, G.R.A.M., Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Rainer Oldendorf, Marco Poloni, Mark Raidpere, Camera Austria, Graz, 24.9. – 26.11.2006

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun

 

Rainer Oldendorf, Marco Gallo auf dem Balkon der Wohnung meiner Eltern / Marco Gallo on the balcony of my parents’ house, Lörrach, Frühjahr / spring 1977, Einladungskarte für / Invitaton card to “Marco 1”, Ausstellungsraum Thomas Taubert, Düsseldorf. Design: Gabriele Franziska Götz, 1995 (links / left); Riesstraße 1, Lörrach, Winter 1996/97, Farbvergrößerung nach Kleinbild-Diapositiv / colour blow-up from small picture slide, 2005. Courtesy Galerie Erna Hécey, Brüssel.

 

knowing you, knowing me.On Complicity with Images

In recent years the concept of surveillance – at the interface between visual and communicative media, image and network, public sphere, mass media and privacy – has assumed a prominent position in debates that set out to describe social interactions in which pictures play a decisive role. And yet surveillance not only denotes strategies of control and discipline, it also outlines forms of voyeurism and an obscene, as you might say, politics of representation of the subject, that is taking on increasingly strange forms, for example in the mass medium of television. Surveillance and representational claim, recording and enactment manifest themselves as inter-related practices of a visual culture that are increasingly becoming a public technology of the self, a technology of publishing the self.This “public” is increasingly being colonised by a form of (mediatised) “private sphere”, for example in the mass-media proliferation of talk shows, boundless interest in the public representation of private affairs, and the growing public interest in intimate details of celebrities, stars and politicians. Coupled with an obsession with immediacy, the question is in what way the individual has already internalised the “power” of pictures to such an extent that it is starting to identify with the mechanisms of representation as they seem to guarantee a possibility of participating in a culture of the public. “Today the surveillant gaze (…) has completely lost its deterrent effect and has, on the contrary, been reinterpreted as a gaze that grants an event the status of reality.” (Thomas Y. Levin)
Against this backdrop of constant enactment of individuality, authenticity and identity, pictures are assuming a new role: instead of representation and appearance, the focus is now on circulation and performativity – a form of complicity between the subject and the picture is beginning to emerge in which it is no longer a matter of surveillance, control or discipline in the stricter sense, but rather of forms of appropriating conventions of representation and the exploitation of pictures in the course of constant (published) identity work.
The “knowing you, knowing me” exhibition explores current photographic positions with regard to this mechanism of a fundamental connection between picture and (social) subject, in which the contours of a specific role of pictures are evolving within general cultural-visual horizons. The artists featured at the exhibition assume previous pictorial knowledge of the recipients, deploying various forms of transfer of pictorial disositifs as a strategy of constructing meanings. In this process, they occupy photography in different ways as an “agent” of enacting reality, identity or lifestyle, thus involving photography as a kind of “accomplice” in the – ironical, critical or subversive – construction of realities in which knowledge of the constructedness and thus also the complicity of the viewer has always been inherent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First the artist defines meaning. On the Conceptual Paradigm

with Miles Coolidge, Ralf Hoedt, Joachim Koester, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch, Peter Piller, Christine Würmell

Camera Austria, Graz, 8.7. – 10.9.2006

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Reinhard Braun

 

 

First the artist defines meaning. On the Conceptual ParadigmThen the work takes place, this is how Dan Graham continues with the description of Sol LeWitt’s artistic practice: and yes, ultimately “First the artist defines meaning*” sets out to open up a space for artists and their works, whose common aspects are not only the methodical points of contact with conceptual strategies and thematic continuation, but which, in addition, construct new levels of meaning and ways of seeing by reworking different local conditions and spatial situations.
“First the artist defines meaning*” showcases artistic positions that are determined by a questioning of dispostifs of representation, representational conventions, paradigms of narration, reception and also politics. The artists break away from specific aesthetic allocations to ask about specific (also political and image-political) attitudes.
With different formal and media-specific strategies, they re-question and re-formulate specifically connotated spaces and places / architectures and culturally coded parameters of spaces / places in processes of re-photographing (Joachim Koester) and re-contextualising (Ralf Hoedt, Peter Piller), in processes of re-ordering partially historical material and associated framework data (Ralf Hoedt, Peter Piller, Christine Würmell), in models of measuring and transforming (Six & Petritsch) and breaking up (Miles Cooldige) space. This also demonstrates the wish for a geographical, institutional and political, economical change of paradigm.

The exhibition thus depicts a fundamental, ongoing occupation with those contemporary art productions that operate in a media-critical and in a political context with their work. Finally, the statement that it is first and foremost the artists who open up a space of meaning, also opens up a perspective on art that brings the theoretical potential of the works themselves into play, attempting to question the contexts of production and reception once again.

 

* Dan Graham, “Thoughts on Two Structures by Sol LeWitt” (1966), in: Dan Graham, Selected Works, 1965 – 72, 1972.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Landschaft / Krajina

mit Kaucylia Brooke, Miles Coolidge, William Eggleston, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Gerald van der Kaap, Werner Kaligofsky, Masafumi Sanai, Michael Schuster, Ingrid Simon, Lois and / und Franziska Weinberger, Hans Schabus, Manfred Willmann

Österreichisches Kulturforum Prag, 16.12.2004 – 14.2.2005

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

Kaucylia Brooke, The Flame, San Diego, 1996. From the series: The Boy Mechanic / San Diego, 2004.

Ulrike Lienbacher, Pin Up Übungen 2001 und 10 + 10 Fotografien

Camera Austria, Graz, 7.1. – 31.1.2002

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

Ulrike Lienbacher, Pin Up Übungen / Pin Up Exercises, 2001. Offsetdruck auf Büttenpapier / offset print on handmade paper. Courtesy: Galerie Krinzinger, Wien / Vienna. 

 

Ulrike Lienbacher, aus der Serie: 10 + 10 Photographien, 2000.Ulrike Lienbacher, aus der Serie: 10 + 10 Photographien, 2000. Courtesy: Galerie Krinzinger, Wien / Vienna. 

 

Ulrike Lienbacher, aus der Serie: 10 + 10 Photographien, 2000.Ulrike Lienbacher, aus der Serie: 10 + 10 Photographien, 2000. Courtesy: Galerie Krinzinger, Wien / Vienna.

 

Ulrike Lienbacher, aus der Serie: 10 + 10 Photographien, 2000.Ulrike Lienbacher, aus der Serie: 10 + 10 Photographien, 2000. Courtesy: Galerie Krinzinger, Wien / Vienna.

Tatiana Lecomte, Orte

Camera Austria, Graz, 10.3. – 11.4.2003.

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black]

Camera Austria, 4.10. – 18.10.2002.

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black]

by Allan Sekula

The working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 AM if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margins of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-photojournalism: no flash, no telephoto zoom lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.Later, working at the light table, and reading the increasingly stereotypical descriptions of the new face of protest, I realized all the more that a simple descriptive physiognomy was warranted. The alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied and inspired than could be conveyed by cute alliterative play with “teamsters” and “turtles”.Describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets, against the abstraction of global capital. There was a strong feminist dimension to this testimony, and there was also a dimension grounded in the experience of work. It was the men and women who work on the docks, after all, who shut down the flow of metal boxes from Asia, relying on individual knowledge that there is always another body on the other side of the sea doing the same work, that all this global trade is more than a matter of a mouse-click.

One fleeting hallucination could not be photographed. As the blast of stun grenades reverberated amidst the downtown skyscrapers, someone with a boom box thoughtfully provided a musical accompaniment: Jimi Hendrix?s mock-hysterical rendition of the American national anthem. At that moment, Hendrix returned to the streets of Seattle, slyly caricaturing the pumped-up sovereignty of the world?s only superpower.

 

Extra-Territoria / Graz 2000, Milica Tomic and Róza El-Hassan walking and thinking about Overpopulation

Camera Austria, Graz, 30.5. – 7.7.2000

curated by Christine Frisinghelli and Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

T-Shirt Edition Milica Tomic and Róza El-Hassan, I am Overpopulation, 2000. Produced by Camera Austria, 2000. Photo: Maren Lübbke-Tidow (private, 2012)

Gottfried Bechtold – Hans Schabus, Fotoprofile

Camera Austria, Graz, 3.9. – 17.9.1999

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow

 

 

 

Camera Austria 65 64

mit Vlasta Delimar, Hubbard Birchler, Friedl Kubelka, Lois Renner, Joke Robaard, Ed Ruscha, Wolfgang Tillmans, Franz West

Camera Austria, Graz, 17.4. – 17.5.1999

curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow und Manfred Willmann

 

 

Friedl Kubelka, Porträt Louise Anna Kubelka, 1978 – 1996.

 

 

 

Franz West, Proforma

Museum moderner Kunst Sammlung Stiftung Ludwig

20er Haus Wien, 16.3. – 19.5.1996

curated by Eva Badura-Triska, curatorial assistance: Maren Lübbke-Tidow