CMRK openings in Graz, Austria: winter 2015
CMRK is a network of four independent institutions for contemporary art based in Graz: Camera Austria, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM–), < rotor >, and Grazer Kunstverein.
Erik van der Weijde: Gebilde
Camera Austria
December 6, 2014–February 15, 2015
www.camera-austria.at
Philipp Timischl
They were treating me like an object. As if I were some sextoy or shit. I don’t wanna see them again.
Künstlerhaus
Halle für Kunst & Medien
December 5, 2014–February 22, 2015
www.km-k.at
The Art of Urban Practice: Neighbourhood and Expertise
< rotor >
December 6, 2014–February 28, 2015
www.rotor.mur.at
Christian Friedrich: On Something New / Dirt in a Hole
Will Holder: High Energy Bar
Grazer Kunstverein
December 15, 2014–February 15, 2015
www.grazerkunstverein.org
I visited the ice-skating lanes where Belgian psychopath Marc Dutroux used to go skating before he started to kidnap young girls. I visited the meadow on the top of a mountain where the opening scene of the 1965 musical film The Sound of Music was shot. I travelled to the house where Eva Braun had lived in Munich. I went to Hiroshima to photograph the last part of the modernist rebuilding project. And to Pomerode, the most German town in Brazil. And to more than ten cities around the world to photograph buildings by Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer. And to an idyllic settlement in the Berlin forest that was built for SS officers in the 1930s. Or to the house near Vienna where the kidnapping victim Natascha Kampusch was held hostage for over eight years. Many of these examples don’t seem to have much in common, but they are all (little) parts that together constitute our collective history and memory.
The exhibition at Camera Austria is curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow and is the first solo presentation of the artist in Austria. On the occasion of this exhibition a book is being published in the Edition Camera Austria with contributions by Pierre Dourthe, Frits Gierstberg, Maren Lübbke-Tidow, Dan Rule, Erik van der Weijde, and Jan Wenzel (German / English / French / Dutch).
Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien is pleased to present Philipp Timischl’s first large institutional exhibition, for which he developed a new installation and an artist’s book. The title already hints at the contextual path that Timischl (b. 1989, AT) takes as he evades the snares hidden in the process of questioning the critique of representation amid a media-saturated society, the traps involved in inquiring into identity and its constructions, or the adequate production of art by the next generation in an astonishingly relaxed and productive way.
Rather than displaying autonomous objects, Timischl presents a pool of information. He reveals the process of conceiving and producing an exhibition, bringing all of the elements together onto one equal level by using printed banners hanging evenly spread throughout the space, fog machines, and a commissioned soundtrack. On the banners visitors see stills from an as of yet unfinished video project, next to various information such as the title of the exhibition, this very press release, conversations with friends, pages from the artist book, or the lyrics to the soundtrack. It is the personified exhibition, justifying itself and addressing the visitor directly: “They were treating me like an object. As if I were some sextoy or shit. I don’t wanna see them again.”
With bankleer, Documentary Embroidery Office, Landscape Choreography, Andreja Kulunčić and Cartography Workshop
Following the exhibition at Museum de Hallen in Haarlem (NL), the Grazer Kunstverein presents the first solo show in Austria by artist Christian Friedrich (b. 1977, DE). The exhibition titled On Something New / Dirt in a Hole presents an array of artwork including a newly produced, large-scale sound and light work, an immersive, monumental video installation, and a series of earlier sculptures. Friedrich’s artistic interest lies in the structure, manipulation, and conditions of subject-object relationships. A common theme in the artist’s work is the subjugation of the human body, which he regularly presents as an object of desire in which power and submission collapse into the subliminal.
