Yalda Afsah: Every word was once an animal
June 25–September 4, 2022
Burgring 2
8010 Graz
Austria
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +43 316 740084
info@halle-fuer-kunst.at
HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to present the summer program 2022 with two large solo exhibitions of the work of the artists Anita Leisz and Yalda Afsah. Both exhibitions feature elaborate new productions and publications by the respective artists.
Anita Leisz
The visual language of Anita Leisz’s sculptures, objects, and installations oscillates between echoes of minimal art, non-figurative painting, and industrialism. Leisz relies on rather restrained materials, with cold colors and forms. Materials used in the construction industry, such as various types of fiberboard, metals, and sheet metals are prepared in several steps and placed in relation to spaces and viewers. The specific ways in which Leisz processes and shapes these industrial materials lead to remarkable results with great presence and sensitivity, standing for the quality of her work and raising questions about art production and reception today.
Anita Leisz always connects her artistic works with the places where they are presented and has a specific intervention in these places in mind. Her exhibitions are dramatic installations that tie the exterior and interior of a space together inseparably with and through art; object and space thus lend each other significance. By using this strategy of appropriation, Leisz resists standardized and uniform reception. The artist offers her audience precise and immediate settings representing different options for working with a given space, making this transformability the marker of her practice. In keeping with this program, the artist will approach the venue of her new solo exhibition with precisely conceived artworks — very conscious artistic positions that challenge perception and invite us to question what is visible and what is not. Leisz here deliberately avoids any kind of narrative point of reference, drawing our attention completely to the relationship between object, space, and recipient.
This exhibition project is one consequence of the artist winning the Styrian State Prize in Recognition of Fine Art in 2020.
Curated by Sandro Droschl.
Yalda Afsah
The human relationship with animals, and the agency surrounding that interaction is critical to the work of the German-Iranian artist Yalda Afsah. Together with Kunstverein München, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents her first institutional solo exhibition, focusing on questions of power, care, and control in relation to domestication. Using three examples — bullfighting, horse dressage, and pigeon breeding — she examines the blurred boundaries between affection and identification with animals on the one hand, as well as submission and human domination on the other.
In the conditioning of animals, anthropocentric power relations become evident. Afsah’s works reveal the ambiguous character of the forces that operate at the center of these relationships. She directs our gaze to the moments when the bodies of humans and animals are marked by an uncanny closeness: the camera lingers on the aesthetic yet unnatural movements of a horse, focuses on the concentrated aggression of a bull, or follows the gazes of men searching the sky for pigeons performing falls.
In ancient eurocentric definitions of social space, exclusion has long been inscribed. As philosopher Fahim Amir writes: “a place to which neither animals, plants, slaves nor women had access, but only the free anthropos loitering smartly,” while the others struggle at the edges. It is precisely these margins that Afsah focuses on in her work, for that is where we decide who cares for or subjugates whom, and who is even defined as an independent subject in the first place. The animals themselves appear in Afsah’s works as protagonists and as living beings — not only under the gaze of their human companions.
Curated by Maurin Dietrich and Cathrin Mayer.
The HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is supported by the Regional Government of Styria, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, and the City of Graz.
Press inquiries: Helga Droschl
