CMRK openings in Graz, Austria
CMRK is a network of four independent institutions for contemporary art based in Graz: Camera Austria, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM–), , and Grazer Kunstverein.
Disputed Landscape
The Visual Paradigm
Camera Austria
March 13–May 10, 2015
www.camera-austria.at
DIDING [crossed out]
An Interior That Remains an Exterior?
Künstlerhaus
Halle für Kunst & Medien
March 14–May 31, 2015
www.km-k.at
The Art of Urban Practice: Breaking Out of Dilemma
March 13–May 22, 2015
www.rotor.mur.at
David Wojnarowicz & Robert Blanchon
Grazer Kunstverein
March 7–May 23, 2015
www.grazerkunstverein.org
Landscapes are never simply there. Landscapes are always an expression of relationships. Landscape is a social covenant, a convention. In this nexus of relations and conventions, photographs play a central role. If landscape always represents a combination of aesthetic, social, economic, symbolic, and spatial elements, and photography “serves as a kind of relay connecting theories of art, language, and the mind with conceptions of social, cultural, and political value” (W. J. T. Mitchell), then a complex articulation of culture arises at the junction between landscape and photography: both associate that history with this view, that text with this identity, that memory with this place, that place with this history. Both landscape and photography embody a space where differences are yielded; both are linked to identity, memory, knowledge, history, and experience and provide a stage for related inscriptions. Photography does not reflect landscape as politics, knowledge as aesthetics, or vision as image. Instead, it articulates, through the dispositifs of their representations, the intertwining affinities among vision, image, expression, knowledge, body, and also landscape. Herein lies the politics of the photographic image. The Visual Paradigm is the first part of Camera Austria´s exhibition series “Disputed Landscape,” followed by Uncovering History and Enacting Landscape.
With Stephanie Kiwitt, Christian Mayer, Ricarda Roggan, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch
For the extensive exhibition DIDING [crossed out] – An Interior That Remains an Exterior?, the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM–) is bringing together 18 international artists, many of whom are now being exhibited in Austria for the first time. Against the background of various degrees of digital acceleration in present-day lifestyles and increasingly noticeable, latently growing political and economic tensions that in the process spill over to “things” (and people), the exhibition is seeking to present an up-to-date atmospheric picture. Digital material has long since advanced from a discrete breaking point in the 1990s to an evident state of affairs, and it not only intervenes in the present-day world of images but also in the surrounding materiality of things themselves. Although the works shown attest to a common interest in the digital, they are precisely not interested in rendering, in the sense of supposed progress, digitality as a media transfer from analogue to digital or technologies in relation to a reordering of images and their representation. The interest of the positions brought together here goes beyond the portrayal of the purely digital. The exhibition rather illustrates different structural features of the digital and its interaction with things. How do their physicality, temporality, and semantics manifest? In a rapidly changing world, objects and their referents are questioned anew in terms of their relation to reality.
With Michele Abeles, Laura Aldridge, Trisha Baga, Alisa Baremboym, Anna Barham, Dora Budor, Lisa Holzer, Josh Kolbo, Julian Palacz, Charlotte Prodger, Sam Pulitzer et al., Jon Rafman, Sean Raspet, Hannah Sawtell, Jack Strange, Sergei Tcherepnin, Stewart Uoo, Jordan Wolfson
In the industrial suburb of Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic, a large number of art projects have been carried out since the 1990s under the patronage of the Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University (FAD/UJEP). The district in focus is called Předlice. It is marked by long-term deprivation, from which the local population, mostly Romani inhabitants, suffers strongly. Diverse forms of collaborative and participatory interventions, initiated by various artists, scholars, and students, have led to numerous cooperations with the local inhabitants, and thus to mutual trust, understanding, and lasting impact on both sides. The exhibition at
With Pavel Beneš & Michaela Labudová with Studio of Visual Design (FAD/UJEP), Pravdoliub Ivanov, Aleš Kachlík & Tomáš Sákra, Blanka Kirchner, Pavel Kopřiva with Studio of Interactive Media (FAD/UJEP), Richard Loskot, Mjölk, Pavel Mrkus, Anna Musilová, Jindřiška Sokolová; curated by Michal Koleček and Zdena Kolečková
The Grazer Kunstverein continues to question the concept of social abstraction by presenting work by two exceptional American artists who have both gained cult status in the United States. Each of their practices investigates and translates the personal and physical relationship towards their surroundings. The works of David Wojnarowicz and Robert Blanchon reflect on the United States in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, when gay and queer politics were severely suppressed and questioned during the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The poetic but often direct approach of these two AIDS activists represents a period that currently seems to gain more prominence due to the neoliberal ideologies that are forced upon our perception of society. Developed in close collaboration with the NYU Fales Library, New York, this unique exhibition concentrates on the photography, videos, and films produced by the artists during their practice.
