Image Wars: The Power of Images / Gerlind Zeilner: Cowgirls

Image Wars: The Power of Images
Kader Attia, Cana Bilir-Meier, Melvin Moti, Rabih Mroué, Mario Pfeifer, Marlies Pöschl

When we recall, we do so in images: In brief visual sequences, we repeat moments from the past in our mind’s eye. So, it is images that are manifested as our personal and collective history. The production, consumption, and instrumentalization of visual material continually affects social and aesthetic visual memory and thus contributes to our understanding of cultural and historical events. With the exhibition project Image Wars: The Power of Images, the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, is presenting video art works by six international artists that take up the mechanisms between the contemporary reception of images and the culture of memory. This still new power of images has particular impact in the context of represented or actually practiced physical or psychological violence, with the experience of personal or collective trauma. With an eye to historical memory, especially in retrospective collective perception of wars and political conflicts, modern visual media, whether in technological variations in the form of photography and film or in the electronic version as television and Internet, take on a special significance. Visual memory of violent images cannot be understood without taking into account our reception of violence, whether captured in media or actually practiced. Torn between repulsive and attractive forces, our looking at depictions of suffering constantly alternates between looking at and looking away.

Curated by Jana Franze

Gerlind Zeilner: Cowgirls

Gerlind Zeilner is interested in the tensions and ambiguities within painting, including pictorial ideas shaped by a male-dominated art history that tends to the clichéd. In her structural significant and therein fragile, broken virtuosity, Zeilner works on figurative-abstract pictorial spaces full of critical and colorful suggestions about the existence of a female painter among male painters—of women among men. In convivial scenes of togetherness and shared experience in fictional Western and real artists’ bars, mostly heroic and overwhelmingly male gestures are called into question, in ways ranging from critical to humorous, by means of a special arrangement of color and forms and refreshing recast, for example, by engaging with paintings of bars in the work of the likes of Nicole Eisenman, Jörg Immendorff, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Zeilner adroitly plays with a kind of temporariness and incompleteness, for which the New York writer Raphael Rubinstein has proposed the apt term “provisional painting.” These astonishingly opulent and sensitive experiments and rifts seem to be connected to the sketch-like quality and unbridled potential of drawing that often precedes her painting and has an essential influence on its production. The results of her current working process are self-confidently and autonomous developed paintings that lend brilliance to the fragility of painting in complex times. Catalog available.

Curated by Sandro Droschl

The Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM–) stands for a house of art and its media—a place where the exhibition, production, and discussion of art are brought up to date, serving as a platform for essential issues concerning artistic producers and also visitors who actively partake in related discourse. Erected in 1952 and newly positioned in 2013, the KM– as a dignified institution with a new shine, pursuing a contemporary orientation lives up to its traditional reputation as one of the loveliest exhibition venues in Austria with exceptional architecture, while simultaneously striving to create an optimum framework for presenting and exploring the art of today.