Sylvia Schedelbauer and Triple Candie at Grazer Kunstverein

As part of the Spring Season Grazer Kunstverein is proud to present two new exhibitions by Sylvia Schedelbauer, the Berlin-based filmmaker, and by Triple Candie, the Washington DC-based duo of art historians. These distinct exhibitions overlap spatially, with Triple Candie’s discrete building-wide installations visible when the lights are on, from 11am–2:30pm, and Sylvia Schedelbauer’s large-scale immersive video projections filling the galleries when the lights are off, from 2:30pm to 6pm daily.

Sylvia Schedelbauer
Collected Works 2004–2018

Sylvia Schedelbauer produces experimental moving image works, that range from auto-biographical documentaries to visceral explorations of imagined scenarios. This exhibition is a large-scale immersive passage through Schedelbauer’s entire oeuvre, bringing us from her most recent work Wishing Well, 2018 right back to her first work Memories, 2004.

Over the years Schedelbauer has developed her own unique cinematic structural language to interrogate themes such as cultural dislocation, what it means to be transnational, the slippery shifts between fiction and reality, and memory, as an unreliable but compelling insight into history. She uses narrative tools like dream logic, biography, allegorical collage, free association and storytelling to create highly engaging sensory experiences, that sometimes take years to complete. Her flickering filmic works stretch and accelerate the potential of found footage. Often working with source material such as orphan films—educational, industrial, amateur footage, home movies and newsreels—from archives or personal collections, Schedelbauer manipulates imagery to transform it into something totally new. In this way she inhabits existing material, bending it to her will to form an original narrative of her own (re)construction, creating new versions of a story every time.

Schedelbauer’s work is regularly screened at film festivals internationally. This exhibition marks her first solo show in a gallery context, and the first comprehensive exhibition of her complete works. The exhibition booklet will include a newly commissioned text by Alice Butler, Dublin-based film programmer, curator and co-director of aemi.

Triple Candie
The Culmination of Eighteen Months of Speculative Inquiry into the Anaphoric and Cataphoric Plays of a Situationist Aesthete: This Exhibition—which isn’t really about Narratology per se—Collects the Unfaithful Simulations, (Re)Articulations, and Interpolations Endeavored by Triple Candie, in Principled Reverence for the Deceased and Beloved American Artist Michael Asher (1943–2012)

Throughout 2018 and early 2019 Triple Candie (Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett) undertook a multi-layered research project investigating the work and legacy of the legendary American conceptual artist Michael Asher. Asher is well known for creating temporary installations in museum and gallery environments, often foregrounding the various hidden systems and assumptions that make art viewing possible. Triple Candie researched his oeuvre in order to understand and embody his production methodology, and to apply it, in a new and moderately theatrical way, to the specific context of the Grazer Kunstverein.

As part of the research project Triple Candie proposed multiple speculative installations, that were realised in a sequential seasonal rhythm throughout 2018. In practice, these installations were an attempt to resurrect the lost experiential potentialities of the work of an artist like Asher, asking “is it possible, through the speculative potential of arts practice, to reactivate expired gestures, in new or meaningful ways?” Marking the culmination of this extensive research project, as part of the Spring Season we present a reprise of the first four installations, together with seven additional proposals that were previously unrealised. The exhibition will be documented with a forthcoming catalogue publication, contextualising the entire project.

Grazer Kunstverein is structurally supported by the city of Graz, the Federal Chancellery of Austria Arts and Culture Division, the province of Styria, legero united | con-tempus.eu, and its members. The project with Triple Candie is produced in collaboration with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art.

Entrance throughout 2019 is free. Events as part of our active public programme are posted on the “calendar” section of our website. For more information on our projects or activities please email office@grazerkunstverein.org