CMRK exhibitions in Graz, Austria
CMRK is a network of four independent institutions for contemporary art based in Graz:
Camera Austria, Kunstverein Medienturm, < rotor >, and Grazer Kunstverein.
Margherita Spiluttini
und dann (reframing architecture)
Camera Austria
21 April–10 June 2012
www.camera-austria.at
Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch
View may be denied by cargo
Kunstverein Medienturm
21 April–9 June 2012
www.medienturm.at
ELSEWHERE
Christoph Grill, Anna Jermolaewa, Mahony, Micha Payer + Martin Gabriel, Isa Riedl, Jun Yang
< rotor >
21 April–16 June 2012
www.rotor.mur.at
Tanja Widmann
eine von euch
Grazer Kunstverein
21 April–9 June 2012
www.grazerkunstverein.org
Margherita Spiluttini‘s architectural photography derives from a specific way of viewing. In her comprehensive oeuvre, we find a method of thinking and seeing that links architecture, space, landscape, and vision to the photographic image. In this sense, Spiluttini proves to be a sensitive chronicler of the gears of time, and (as the artist herself notes) she in turn operates—all the while keeping in mind a “radical acknowledgement of found material” (Spiluttini)—in the spirit of Peter and Alison Smithson, who as architects argued against the renewal of old structures. The exhibition pays tribute to Spiluttini’s contribution to the representation of architecture and landscape as the production of space and their translation into photographic imagery. Margherita Spiluttini is developing a contribution specifically for Camera Austria, one that likewise reacts to the unique architectural history of the site and its new definition as an exhibition space.
For the project, View may be denied by cargo, the artists Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch experiment with all of their possessions: objects that are necessary for their daily routine or the outcome of their work, even though the items appear to be useless. Toothbrushes, books, computers, beds, tables, clothes, cars, but also the keys to their apartment, bank cards, or passports are amassed in the Kunstverein Medienturm premises. The original function of those objects is suspended, for they are listed in an inventory and presented to the public in sculptural form. This inventory, the transfer, and the objects’ performative rearrangement elucidate the mediality of things. The accompanying artist book documents, with conceptual consistency, not the installation in Graz but the artists’ now empty living and work spaces, as well as all of the things that slowly accumulate again over the course of the exhibition. The artist book is published by Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg.
Once a year, < rotor > organises an exhibition introducing up-to-date positions of artists working in Austria. Being on the road, travelling, visiting other places are all fundamental aspects of the artistic contributions to this year’s selection entitled ELSEWHERE. Yet we are not talking about travelogues or reportage covering faraway countries, but instead about observations from different cultural contexts, which are recontextualised in the frame of the exhibition. Thus manifold possibilities of interpretation open up for the viewers. And comparisons with what we have experienced ourselves elsewhere are inevitable.
The work of Tanja Widmann emerges from an interest in the potential of language and its role in the performative construction of subjectivity. Drawing on historical concepts of video-based performance, she analyses technologies of reproduction, memory, and repetition, situating the apparatus of the camera as a recording, affective, and interpretational machine. For her solo exhibition at Grazer Kunstverein, Tanja Widmann is creating a new large-scale installation that takes its starting point from the script of a psychoanalytical session between Félix Guattari and his patient R.A., in which the recording equipment itself assumes a central role. Via this basic configuration of “knowing” and “unknowing” subjects, Widmann brings together such seemingly diverse elements as psychoanalysis, primatology, an H&M collection, as well as embroidery and macramé works in a speculative constellation that explores gender- and media-related questions of identity construction within the performative dynamics of social groups.
