Ursula Mayer: ATOM SPIRIT

Ursula Mayer works across film, sculpture, photography and installation to create “kaleidoscopic” spaces where multiple references converge and boundaries dissolve. Her films fuse formal experimentation with myth, biopolitics and the semiotics of cinema, to visualize and ruminate upon posthuman ontology. In 2014 Mayer won the prestigious “Derek Jarman Award for Radical Filmmaking.”

Set in Trinidad & Tobago, ATOM SPIRIT is a large-scale film installation which acts as a nexus where race, gender, postcolonialism and technology intersect. Traversing simulated and virtual platforms, alongside scientific, ecological and social spaces, the film creates completely mixed, interpenetrating realities where interrogations of the postcolonialism, ecology and queerness can take place. Thus ATOM SPIRIT builds a palimpsest of trajectories, not just through making alliances between different organic and cybernetic entities, but also through tracing the legacies of colonialism and capital into our current moment of neoliberal dominance.

The exhibition comments upon and explores the politicized ecologies of our times, in order to excavate the possibilities and perils regarding our shared techno-natural future. The exhibition’s immersive space, combined with the film’s speculative narrative, emphasises the necessity of reconceptualising and radically reforming our relationships with the environment, non-human entities and each other. The film asserts a politics that both takes apart patriarchal taxonomies and builds up queer ecologies in their stead.

Ursula Mayer completed her MFA at Goldsmiths University London in 2004. Recently her work has been shown in SeMA Biennale Mediacity, Seoul; THE NEW HUMAN in Moderna Museet, Stockholm & Moderna Museet Malmö, and at the Hayward Gallery, London. Upcoming shows include TANK, FHNW, Institut Kunst, Basel; Vleeshal, Middelburg, and at HOME, Manchester.

Chris McCormack is a writer and associate editor of Art Monthly. 

Running concurrently to Ursula Mayers’ exhibition is the show Coming to See by Annelies Senfter.

Annelies Senfter
Coming to See
October 13–November 26, 2017

Annelies Senfter’s work is situated between photography, research and poetic investigation, and investigating notions of memory and trauma. Her work resonates with an urge to uncover repressed subjects without stirring up negative sentiments.

All exhibitions curated by Séamus Kealy, Director, Salzburger Kunstverein.
 

Lecture by Terry Eagleton: “The Limits of Identity Politics”
November 24, 7pm

World-renowned author, critic and theorist Terry Eagleton comes to the Salzburger Kunstverein to deliver a lecture entitled “The Limits of Identity Politics.”

“If Terry Eagleton didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
–Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers

“Hope Without Optimism (by Terry Eagleton) is the best formula of the authentic religion that fits our dark times.”
–Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End Times

Terry Eagleton is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Eagleton has published over 50 books spanning the fields of literary theory, postmodernism, politics, ideology and religion, including the seminal Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which has sold over 750,000 copies. The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period. He has also been a prominent critic of postmodernism, publishing works such as The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). His most recent books, including Culture and the Death of God (2014), Hope Without Optimism (2015), Materialism (2016), and Culture (2016) are all printed by Yale University.