Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
http://www.akbild.ac.at
Kaleidoscreen
9 – 11 April 2008
Christoph Meier
16 – 18 April 2008
Curator in residence 07|08:
Diana Baldon
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Schillerplatz 3 | Aula
1010 Vienna | Austria
Phone ( 43 1) 588 16-0
[email protected]
http://www.akbild.ac.at
Kaleidoscreen
Private view: Tuesday, 8 April 2008, 7:00 p.m.
Diana Baldon in conversation with Matthias Michalka (art historian and Curator for New Media Art, Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna), Stuart Comer (Curator of Film, Tate Modern, London), and Dorit Margreiter (artist and Professor for Video and Video Installation, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
Exhibition dates: 9 – 11 April 2008, daily 11:00 a.m. – 18:00 p.m.
Artists: Katharina Cibulka, Philipp Fleischmann, Paul Gründorfer, Muzaffer Hasaltay, Julia Hohenwarter, Steffen Jørgensen, Robert Kjær Clausen and Allan Nicolaisen, Christoph Kolar, Philipp Leissing, Johann Lurf, mara (Serigne Mor Niang), Kader Muzaqi, Jascha Novak, Franziska Pflaum, Linda Reif, Patrick Schabus, Christine Schörkhuber, Jennifer Tischer
Auditorium: Ernst Gruber, David Stöger and Alexandre D’Aram
As a tribute to the seminal experiments in cinema design by Austrian precursors like Friedrich Kiesler and Peter Kubelka and the “cinema palaces” built in Europe and North America during the 1920s and ’30s, this show presents an environment conceived by students of the Art and Architecture Department within which a programme of videos by artists of the Academy will be screened. In the years when cinema display looked into perfecting the power of filmic illusion, Walter Benjamin explored the modalities of the “collective” and “distracted” perception of the public. Seventy years on, we have grown familiar with the ubiquity of projection screens pervading the contemporary media environment. Kaleidoscreen revisits such ideas to question why auditoriums did not historically exploit the power to gather people together and did not take on the same role that projection screens later would. This group exhibition proposes an alternative model that abolishes the fixed viewpoint of the classical perspective to play instead with a sense of disorientation. It attempts to turn the attention back to cinema-going as a social experience to be consumed in semi-obscurity, highlighting the viewers’ physical presence as a form of collective escapism opposed to the bodiless, spaceless sensation of celluloid space or the purist black box machine for film viewing.
Christoph Meier
Private view: Tuesday, 15 April 2008, 7:00 p.m.
The artist in conversation with Peter Pakesch (Director Kunsthaus Graz)
Exhibition dates: 16 – 18 April 2008, daily 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Meier’s studio-based approach to making art is representative of an inquisitive mind. Large free-standing sculptures, minimal in-situ interventions, video installations, and screen prints interrogate the theoretical grounding, reception and boundaries of artistic production. He employs objets trouvés bearing signs of previous activities to playfully reassemble them in an attempt to experiment with error and self-doubt. Using a rigorous formalist vocabulary that appears to pay homage to modernist abstract principles, Meier’s practice does not follow conventional schemes. Work rules and quick design solutions derive from the architectural field that, together with bricolage techniques, elucidate a peculiar approach to formal concerns in sculpture.
Whether over-elaborated or simplified, his works can look like pieces of furniture or Duchampian ready-mades but they distance themselves from discourses around materiality, or “high” and “low art,” to focus on his fascination with the studio as the main context of production, reflection and perception of art. For this exhibition, Meier defies the (mis-)use of ornamental classical design of the neo-Renaissance style of the Academy building planned by Theophil Hansen in the 1870s. The Danish architect’s decorative masquerade inspires him to symbolically rearrange these mannered motifs in a mini “Semper Depot” echoing the warehouse built in these years by Gottfried Semper and Karl Hasenauer, housing studios of the Academy today.
Demo]nstrations[Raum
Initiated in winter 2006, the Demo]nstrations[Raum programme was devised to offer emerging artists of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna the opportunity to confront their practice in conceiving and testing out display models and publicly discuss work within a cycle of temporary exhibitions. Selected by a curator appointed annually, the programme fosters experimentation with the presentation formats of contemporary art within an institutional and educational context promoting innovative research and knowledge production.
Image above:
Johann Lurf, Untitled (still), 2003, DV, 3:00 minutes
For more information go to: http://www.akbild.ac.at
