Tris Vonna-Michell: Vonna-Michell’s House / VALIE EXPORT: WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000

Tris Vonna-Michell: Vonna-Michell’s House
The exhibition Vonna-Michell’s House by Tris Vonna-Michell (born 1982) presents new, existing and reconfigured works from the artist’s two decades of activity. Vonna-Michell has long employed analogue and digital technology alongside new approaches to installation that encompasses performance, sound poetry, printed matter, sculpture, photography and film. For the first time in a public institution, Tris’ father Ed Vonna-Michell’s (1950–2020) photographic and publishing projects from the late 1960s onwards will be shown and integrated with Tris’ recent works.

In 2021, Tris received 244 boxes of material that his father had accumulated, many of which contained unfinished works, research material or indeterminate objects. Ed had been involved with counter-cultural artistic movements including auto-destructive art, expanded cinema, sound poetry, and the British poetry revival movements. Through his publishing house Balsam Flex he created innovative artists’ books and recordings. Examples of material found in Ed’s boxes include numerous large-format camera components and abstract photographs, which had been deliberately crumpled, left unprotected, scratched and contaminated. In this resistance of the creative possibilities offered by such photographic apparatus, Tris perceived parallels with his own work: an encounter with contradiction, abstraction and renewal in archival and time-based media.

In concrete terms, Vonna-Michell’s House comprises several interconnected rooms that include Ed Vonna-Michell’s work in the context of Tris Vonna-Michell’s archive and his characteristic installations. The result is a narrative that consists of multi-generational aspects of sound poetry, artistic publishing, and counter-cultural moments.

Curated by Andrew Hunt and Anja Casser. 

A second iteration of the project will take place at the art gallery Moon Grove, Manchester between February and April 2025. 

VALIE EXPORT: WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000*
The extensive archive stored at the VALIE EXPORT Center in Linz is the point of departure and material source for the project WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000. The exhibition approaches the VALIE EXPORT archive from a feminist perspective, exploring the ways in which female artists have particularly influenced the herstory of media art. VALIE EXPORT has always insisted that the cultural and social status of women and their bodies must be renegotiated in order to actively shape a (medial) future. The promise of the ‘electronic revolution’ effected by digitality is always necessarily bound up with the creation of new and emancipatory spaces.

The exhibition’s central film exposé ALASKA (unrealized, 1987) and the inter-medial theatre piece Stimmen aus dem Innenraum (Voices from an Inner Space; 1988) strive to establish a new female subjectivity, staging encounters between various pioneering women in a virtual space and resisting patriarchal oppression through a myriad of voices and multiple identities. This polyphony is evident as well in VALIE EXPORT’s collaborative curatorial projects, among them the group exhibition MAGNA (1975), the first exhibition in Europe to feature female artists exclusively, with an emphasis on the diversity of their medial approaches.

VALIE EXPORT speaks of the body as a place of presenting and as this presenting itself, of body as a form of notation. In relation to this intimate connection between body, text and language, the project poses corresponding questions to the archive: written and text-based works are an integral component of VALIE EXPORT’s artistic praxis, and exist as lectures, manifestoes, notes, and diaries, as well as poems. Aspects of multidimensionality, variability and non-linearity are inherent to the archive, and influence the–anagrammatical–approach taken by the exhibition: the works are not situated statically, and instead meander between diverse levels and differing temporalities.

Curated by Anja Casser and Yvonne Fomferra. 

The project was initiated by the artist Katrin Mayer and a large part of the archive material is based on her investigations as a research fellow at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz.

In cooperation with the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz and with loans from the studio of VALIE EXPORT, Vienna.

*The title refers to Carolee Schneemann’s contribution for VALIE EXPORT’s exhibition MAGNA (1975).


Program
Friday, November 8, 6pm
Hums and Clicks
Artist talk with Tris Vonna-Michell, Anja Casser and Andrew Hunt
Listening session and sound performance with Tris Vonna-Michell and Marc Matter
Launch of the edition Wo soll das Lachen übernachten by Walter and Jan Verwoert
Open end with DJ

WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000
For talks, lectures, activations, readings and a film program, please visit our website shortly.