Which ideology has the strongest demand today? In the socio-critical marketplace of religious beliefs and world views, past and present ideologies are tested for
their practicality and market value. According to the brokers of God’s Entertainment, the market as a gathering place for potential constituents serves as the terrain ‘wherein the material existence of ideologies is dictated by market lingo’. Black Market strives to serve as a platform for discourse and critique. In this sense, supply becomes a political choice and the decision to buy a subject-position. When sectarianism is the special offer of the week and pseudoscience is cheaper by the kilo, a stance should be taken. What’s on the menu today? Does radical Islam have a bitter taste? Are the people of Innsbruck still caught in their regional cuisine? On the Black market of radical democracy, customers are given a chance to broaden their sense of taste and savour new ideologies. ‘Although National Socialism stinks like rotten fish, its newest version, conserved in a can of tuna, sells like hotcakes.’
‘You shall not have any other gods before me.’ Black Market has something for everyone. Whether it’s 250g of “Fair Trade Fascism” for €1.00, 150g of “dried Feminism” for €2.20, or 100g of “seedless Buddhism” for €1.20, that’s for everyone to decide for themselves. The street vendors guarantee: all goods are fresh!
Generously supported by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna
Information: www.osterfestival.at
What Matters is a film project on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, initiated by the director of Berlin’s International Literature Festival, Ulrich Schreiber, and realized by the Peter Weiss Foundation for Art and Politics in 2017 in the course of the Congress for Democracy and Freedom.
The film shows 30 authors, actors, and students from all continents, each of whom present an article from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, highlighting its continued relevance in 2017.
The Declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and has since been translated into more than 500 languages. To commemorate this, each of the participants, including Vivienne Westwood, Nina Hoss, Can Dundar, Patti Smith, Simon Rattle, Ai Weiwei, Elfriede Jelinek, and David Grossman, reads one of the 30 articles in their native language.
“Maybe it’s something about transcending the body, you know, that the internet allows us, that spirituality allows us, to become larger than we are, more than we are, different from what we are.”
from Melanie Bonajo’s Night Soil – Fake Paradise
DIFFERENT FROM WHAT WE ARE
>> There is, in the respective practices of Melanie Bonajo and Marge Monko, a shared interest in transcendence, in the encounter (with an individual or substance or product) that elevates one into a state of higher being, beyond the known or the familiar. One attains a higher echelon, despite the paradox that, while such experiences generally evoke a shared, collective consciousness, their special character derives precisely from the separation of the individual spirit from mundanely ‘human’ concerns. The transcendental moment is what both connects us to and distinguishes us from the masses below.
What is intriguing here is how such experiences are mediated. They are stimulated by new technologies, by ancient remedies, by consumer products and luxury goods, so that these objects act almost as spirit guides, shamanistic devices that facilitate the process of self-discovery. In Melanie Bonajo’s film Night Soil – Fake Paradise, transcendence is achieved through the ingestion of ayahuasca, an Amazonian medicine used in traditional indigenous rituals. The film relates the experiences of several individuals, as their initial apprehension and anxiety gives way to the powerful psychedelic properties of the brew. Bonajo presents her subjects’ commentaries through a set of startling vignettes: a nude woman in an indoor swimming pool, holding a kitsch painting of an idyllic tropical landscape; a tableau of several costumed individuals, posing and preening amidst plants as they snap selfies on their mobile phones; a merman, with his tail constructed from bubble wrap and a broom, lying in a half-filled bathtub; Bonajo herself, listening to the distorted speech of a potted fern (‘I cost five Euro, I’m born in Germany and I’m single!’) delicately balanced on the naked back of a kneeling woman. In one scenario, an individual scans the forest floor through the screen of her iPad, and flips the lens to watch herself watching, as if only able to truly ‘see’ her surroundings, her actions, when they’ve been filtered through the camera (the scene acts as a counterpart to the film’s opening, where Bonajo herself is recorded wandering the city streets blindfolded).¹ In a way, this moment captures the parallels between the psychedelic and the mediated experiences. As with LSD, wherein the pupils are dilated to absorb more light, the mediated image appears more vivid, in higher resolution, and able to represent details unseen by the naked (or distracted) eye. Or, as one subject describes the effects of ayahuasca: ‘after my first ceremony, I felt like I got this USB stick jammed in my head.’ Transcendence also implies more modest aspirations. In Marge Monko’s installation New Romance, furled and folded fashion magazines are pinned against the gallery walls, intermittently emitting puffs of air fresheners (from brands with names like Forest Waters or Lush Hideaway). Like the scents that used to be included in magazine advertisements, where you could peel off a strip of paper and sniff the particular fragrance, Monko’s works extend into the ether, diffused into the air around the unsuspecting viewer. The objects are positioned between two adjacent galleries, forcing one to walk through, to breathe in, the slowly, dissipating clouds, while on the way to the next room and Monko’s film Dear D, where a computer screen types out an email declaring the narrator’s love for ‘D’, clicking through search engines, recorded footage, Google Translate, YouTube, nytimes.com, alongside references to the Beatles, Siri Hustvedt, André Gorz, and Chris Kraus. The format neatly integrates found and foraged materials, readymade applications, databases of images and information, with that most personal and confessional of literary devices: the love letter. However, the sender – and the recipient – remain anonymous to the viewer, with any response left ultimately unclear, possibly even unreciprocated (as the speaker indicates in her concluding lines: ‘I hope that my epistle will stay between you and me and the googlemail. If the content of it makes you feel uncomfortable, I insist that you ignore it. I’ll be fine.’)² As Gene McHugh notes, the connectivity of the internet might also lead to miscommunication, to a profound misreading of the other’s feelings:
‘Hopefully, as the idea of forming bonds online through screens becomes more and more naturalised – as if they’ve always already been part of the fundamental toolbox of life – realistic social and ethical norms (along with culture that analyses and/ or mythologises these experiences) can be established to guide someone through the complexities of communicating intimately online and understanding what is ethical and what is not. The lack of these broadly defined norms creates a disconnected, two-tiered world in which some exist in a pre-internet reality, while others can only be their real selves online.’³
The internet promises everything. It shows you how to be better, how to become more fulfilled, and then insists that we achieve this unattainable goal. So, instead, this disconnection between the promise and the reality becomes a source of anxiety, a niggling suspicion that the persona that we aspire to is, if not a sham, then at least a distortion, a dissimulation. How to overcome this suspicion? One must merely cast off the real, submit fully and shamelessly to this new reality, and make a virtue of the virtual. The integration of new media into all aspects of human life, affecting and subtly transforming our modes of communication, interaction, creation and recreation, introduces another layer of reification to everyday existence.⁴ In place of a rampant, all encompassing capitalism that nevertheless preserved (or at least projected an illusion of) individual agency, this new evolutionary stage infuses the very atmosphere with seamless, ceaseless connectivity. Information proliferates, signals circulate, data is extracted. Without ever saying it directly, both artists’ works speak of this sense of relentless self-assertion, the promulgation of an artificial identity that is simultaneously ‘more’ real, ‘more’ satisfying, ‘more’ perfect.
1. The sharing of roles between the artist and performers recalls Claire Bishop’s notion of ‘delegated performance’. However, while Bishop poses this tactic as an act of ‘outsourcing’ that, at its best, “produces disruptive events that testify to a shared reality between viewers and performers”, Bonajo’s blurring of the distinction between director and actor, artist and subject, emphasises ideas of communality and collaboration inherent in the film’s exploration of the ayahuasca ritual. The viewer is left unsure as to whether Bonajo is a participant or an observer in the ceremony. Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’ in October no. 140, Spring 2012, p. 112.
2. ‘Communication on the internet is both poly-vocal and notional. One puts things online so that other people can see them, and comment on if they wish – but one has no idea, of course, who will.’ Melissa Gronlund, ‘From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art After the Internet’, in Afterall, Autumn / Winter 2014, p. 8.
3. Gene McHugh, ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships’, in You Are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester/London: Cornerhouse/SPACE, 2014), p. 34.
4. ‘Reification has proceeded to the point where the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimises or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds.’ Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 99-100.
Text: Chris Clarke
Thanks to Kranebitter Einrichtungshaus.
> Tickets
Performance: Pink Eye
>> What do we know when we see someone? In Pink Eye, Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe tests our gaze and the individual filters that we use to categorize people – in her case: black, female, artist, and mother. Referencing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘cast a critical eye on the gaze’ could very well be the motto of the visual artist and choreographer, whose work deals with the (self-) manipulation of bodies in Western Europe, in the Afro-Austrian diaspora, and in Congolese society.¹ How can the gaze be reconquered, broken, diverted? Tambwe loves to push boundaries. Again, according to Merleau-Ponty, man in his ambiguity perceives neither pure consciousness nor pure physicality. Tambwe’s performance relishes the subversion of contrasts between subject and object, stage and backstage, cultivation and trash, as well as individual and cliché. The term ‘pink eye’ refers to both rose-colored glasses and an eye infection – both are clouded vision. Bit by bit, Tambwe peels off a corset of expectations, to stage a truly sensual look behind the mirror.
¹ PINK EYE (19.02.2018)
Music: Battle-Ax, fAUNA, Amen
>> Can we trace how our bodies physically experience the considerable effects of accelerated technological advancements and resulting social change?¹ The fast-moving and genre-breaking compositions of Beatrix Curran, a.k.a. Battle-ax, and Rana Farahani, a.k.a. Fauna, hint at the consequences of these dramatic developments.
The artists are amongst the many contemporary cultural producers reflecting on the mood of our rapidly changing world. Although in different form, both Battle-ax and Fauna’s performances convey the feelings of insecurity and unease triggered in people. The distorted, quivering notes of Battle-ax’s viola powerfully inhabit the space and audience, while Fauna’s deconstructed vocals and trance-like tracks invoke feelings of disorientation² and echoes of an uncertain future. These feelings are further amplified by electronic background tracks that are the result of multiple collaborations, bestowing on the production the flair of a film score, replacing the moving image with that of our imagination.
Battle-ax has returned yet again to performance art recently, and her concert at the Biennial Innsbruck International marks a first: Her highly emotive work engages with Bruno Mokross’s percussion and electronic fragments of DJ Paypal, and through this collaboration brings her artistry to a new level. Fauna’s portion of the concert builds on and solidifies the electronic elements of Battle-ax’s performance. Aleksandar Vučenović, a.k.a. AMEN, then follows with his DJ set to definitively transport us into the futurist world of hybrid club music.
¹ Heiser, J. (2015), Doppelleben. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, p. 481.
² Wiener Festwochen, Fauna (01.03.2018)
Texts: Nicole Alber (Performance), Christian Glatz (Music)
Special thanks to Christian Neururer GmbH.
hosted by Swarovski Kristallwelten
Bringing to life 13 of Edward Hopper’s paintings, the film tells the tale of a woman (story), whose thoughts, emotions, and reflections let us observe an era of American history from the 1930s to the 1960s (history).
Text: Kranzelbinder Gabriele Production
FACTS:
11am >> Breakfast at the Kristallbar (12€)
12pm >> Film screening and talk with Gustav Deutsch, Stephanie Cumming and Hanna Schimek
— The shuttle from Innsbruck main railway station to the Kristallwelten Wattens is included in the ticket of the biennial. Further information can be found here!
15 H DJORDJE ČENIĆ – UNTEN
17 H NINA KUSTURICA – CIAO CHÉRIE
19 H THE RIAHI BROTHERS –
EVERYDAY REBELLION
DJ-SET: DJOKI DJANGO
The movies chosen for the film festival on 21 March 2018 focus on the theme of resistance, which may be rooted in personal experience as well as expressed outwardly as a search for a common language.
DJORDJE ČENIĆ, ‘DOWN THERE’
>> ‘Our yellow Opel is packed. It sits low. It smells of coffee. Once again, we made it over the border with our smuggled goods. On the roof is the door to the house we are building in the village.’ [From the trailer Unten (‘Down There’)]
NINA KUSTURICA, CIAO CHÉRIE
>> Driven by the desire to bridge distances, people visit the telephone booths of a quirky Viennese call shop. The telephone wire, much like an umbilical cord, connects them with a loved one or a distant home. Ciao Chérie takes us on a journey around the world in sound, while visually, an international cosmos blossoms in the singular space.
THE RIAHI BROTHERS, EVERYDAY REBELLION
>> Everyday Rebellion is a documentary essay as well as a web platform about non-violent forms of protest and civil disobedience in the 21st century; a project about technology supported methods of resistance as seen not only in the current Arabian and Iranian uprisings but also through previous revolts, both successful and less successful. The film describes the everyday forms of conscious and subconscious resistance of societies fighting suppression and repression.
Text: Christian Glatz
Awarding: INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL Special Recognition Award
Performance: CHOSIL KIL
Live in concert: MAGIC ISLAND
DJ-SET: ASHIDA PARK
Magic Island
Beware: Musician Magic Island is addictive. Her compositions transport the listener into a different dimension, somewhere between R&B, mainstream, and experimental pop. On her own or with her choir The Angels, this Canadian casts a spell on her viewers with her characteristic style of dance.
Ashida Park In 2016, the vision of inclusive and experimental club music led Antonia XM and Amblio to create a platform for likeminded producers and visual artists, called Ashida Park. With their label, they intend to establish an arena for intimacy and excess and to merge influences from a variety of bass music sub-genres with ambient and noise compositions.
Text: Christian Glatz
Special thanks to Christian Neururer GmbH.
Johanna Tinzl’s works are based on a sensitive and often participatory examination of the history of certain individuals, communities, and places. The photo series Back in Vienna is the result of a close collaboration with Helga Pollak-Kinsky, an Austrian witness to the history of the Shoah. Born in Vienna in 1930 to Jewish parents, Helga Pollak-Kinsky was able to survive the National Socialist persecution. In 1938 she was forced to leave the country and only returned to Vienna in 1957, with her husband and two children. The process of coming back and homecoming continues to this day. How does one reapproach a place where one personally suffered persecution and expulsion? Johanna Tinzl’s photography shows Helga Pollak-Kinsky, adopting VALIE EXPORT’s strategy of ‘Body Configurations’, encountering specific locations in Vienna. Both the body language and the search for a connection with certain sites and buildings reveal memories, emotions, and attitudes. The captions that accompany the photo series read like statements and were developed by Johanna Tinzl and Helga Pollak-Kinsky together.
Text: Jürgen Tabor
Two on each bridge, six flags are posted on three bridges in Innsbruck. Placed opposite, two flags are in communication with one another. Their conversations seems to be not entirely in tune, yet the eagerness to assimilate is apparent. The playful friction of the texts meets right in the middle of the bridges.
Laid by females of many different species, eggs have been an essential ingredient of numerous recipes for thousands of years. Scattered around the city centre of Innsbruck, the other six flags plainly tell six different types of egg dishes. Some classic and the others less typical, the eggy breakfast emphasizes the start of a day and the beginning of life.
Plastic buckets are arranged on a concrete surface, filled with soil from open land. Since there are seeds in the soil / the work will develop on its own. With time, all that remains of the pots will be fragments of / colourless plastic on the overgrown areas. These, too, will ultimately dissolve, and the blossoms alone will recall their initial colour. Later, my work will hardly be noticed / the creator has disappeared.
Lois Weinberger, 1994
> Tickets at oeticket.com and at all Ö-Ticket outlets.
Orpheus, the great singer of Greek mythology, and Eurydice are the epitome of a loving couple. After Eurydice is killed by a venomous snakebite, Orpheus penetrates the depths of Hades to bring her back. When he looks around for her, she disappears irretrievably into the realm of death – he remains in mourning among the living. As to the myth, we encounter him again and again in the operas by Monteverdi and Offenbach and in the literary works of Vergil, Ovid, and Rilke.
But what if Eurydice doesn’t want to go back? What if she refuses and, like clothes that are ‘so-last-season’, decides to discard the structures of feminine identity that can only be derived from someone else’s desiring gaze? Male fantasies of redemption would thereby be robbed of their charm and the shadows of Hades emptied of terror. There would remain the joy of not having to be looked at any more. Elfriede Jelinek approaches the myth of Orpheus from behind. In SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt), she plays with the possibility of an impossible point of view in which the object of desire finally finds her voice.
With: Sarah Melis, Christina Scherrer, Alexandra Sommerfeld
Director: Sabine Mitterecker
Sound: Wolfgang Musil
Dramaturgy: Uwe Mattheiß
Stage design: Notker Schweikhardt, Amélie Haas
Produced by THEATER.punkt | Sabine Mitterecker | 2016
Performing rights: Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg.
Leichtfüßig und spannend … Thomas Trenkler / Kurier
> Tickets at oeticket.com and at all Ö-Ticket outlets.
Orpheus, the great singer of Greek mythology, and Eurydice are the epitome of a loving couple. After Eurydice is killed by a venomous snakebite, Orpheus penetrates the depths of Hades to bring her back. When he looks around for her, she disappears irretrievably into the realm of death – he remains in mourning among the living. As to the myth, we encounter him again and again in the operas by Monteverdi and Offenbach and in the literary works of Vergil, Ovid, and Rilke.
But what if Eurydice doesn’t want to go back? What if she refuses and, like clothes that are ‘so-last-season’, decides to discard the structures of feminine identity that can only be derived from someone else’s desiring gaze? Male fantasies of redemption would thereby be robbed of their charm and the shadows of Hades emptied of terror. There would remain the joy of not having to be looked at any more. Elfriede Jelinek approaches the myth of Orpheus from behind. In SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt), she plays with the possibility of an impossible point of view in which the object of desire finally finds her voice.
With: Sarah Melis, Christina Scherrer, Alexandra Sommerfeld
Director: Sabine Mitterecker
Sound: Wolfgang Musil
Dramaturgy: Uwe Mattheiß
Stage design: Notker Schweikhardt, Amélie Haas
Produced by THEATER.punkt | Sabine Mitterecker | 2016
Performing rights: Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg.
Leichtfüßig und spannend … Thomas Trenkler / Kurier
In Sophie Cundale’s narratives, story and reality, cinematic and performative are closely interwoven. Her film After Picasso, God accompanies the hypnosis session of a woman (played by Cundale), in which an unwanted addiction is treated. In an intensive process with a friend of hers who is a hypnotist as well as an actor, objects, people and images are transformed, pain is brought to the surface and subjected to a transformation. The title of the film refers to the artist Dora Maar, who turned to religion after breaking her relationship with Picasso: ‘After Picasso, Only God.’ – ‘For me this quote describes what it is to love with complete abandon. When you lose someone who became everything to you. What is created in their absence? That’s the film.’¹
1 Sophie Cundale, Interview, Vdrome, 2016 (19.02.2018)
Text: Jürgen Tabor
In his performances, video and audio works, Marcus Coates makes the world tangible from a non-human perspective. In his The Sounds of Others: A Biophonic Line, the British artist sampled a total of 25 sounds from humans and other animals: Using special software, Coates stretched and compressed the voices of starlings, blue whales, seals, canaries, children, and numerous other creatures. This allowed sounds that are normally outside the reach of the human ear to become audible, bringing surprising resemblances to light: slowed down, the human voice begins to sound like a lion, sped up, it sound like twittering birds, while a baby’s cry is slowed down to become the call of an adult. With his acoustical pairings Coates wanted to ‘create a line of linkage between humans [he] possibly could’,¹ because, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘it is actually through voice and through sound and through a certain style that one becomes an animal and certainly through the force of sobriety’.²
The Sounds of Others: A Biophonic Line questions the binary hierarchy of ‘us’ and the ‘others’. In the centre of the Hofgarten, the urban retreat for humans and animals al
ike, Coates’s work presents the culture of soundmaking as a culture beyond the domain of humanity.
1 Interview, Marcus Coates, AnOther Magazine, November 2014 (www.anothermag. com/art-photography/4106/the-sounds-ofothers-by-marcus-coates, 22.02.2018)
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 7.
Text: Nicole Alber
“Maybe it’s something about transcending the body, you know, that the internet allows us, that spirituality allows us, to become larger than we are, more than we are, different from what we are.”
from Melanie Bonajo’s Night Soil – Fake Paradise
DIFFERENT FROM WHAT WE ARE
>> There is, in the respective practices of Melanie Bonajo and Marge Monko, a shared interest in transcendence, in the encounter (with an individual or substance or product) that elevates one into a state of higher being, beyond the known or the familiar. One attains a higher echelon, despite the paradox that, while such experiences generally evoke a shared, collective consciousness, their special character derives precisely from the separation of the individual spirit from mundanely ‘human’ concerns. The transcendental moment is what both connects us to and distinguishes us from the masses below.
What is intriguing here is how such experiences are mediated. They are stimulated by new technologies, by ancient remedies, by consumer products and luxury goods, so that these objects act almost as spirit guides, shamanistic devices that facilitate the process of self-discovery. In Melanie Bonajo’s film Night Soil – Fake Paradise, transcendence is achieved through the ingestion of ayahuasca, an Amazonian medicine used in traditional indigenous rituals. The film relates the experiences of several individuals, as their initial apprehension and anxiety gives way to the powerful psychedelic properties of the brew. Bonajo presents her subjects’ commentaries through a set of startling vignettes: a nude woman in an indoor swimming pool, holding a kitsch painting of an idyllic tropical landscape; a tableau of several costumed individuals, posing and preening amidst plants as they snap selfies on their mobile phones; a merman, with his tail constructed from bubble wrap and a broom, lying in a half-filled bathtub; Bonajo herself, listening to the distorted speech of a potted fern (‘I cost five Euro, I’m born in Germany and I’m single!’) delicately balanced on the naked back of a kneeling woman. In one scenario, an individual scans the forest floor through the screen of her iPad, and flips the lens to watch herself watching, as if only able to truly ‘see’ her surroundings, her actions, when they’ve been filtered through the camera (the scene acts as a counterpart to the film’s opening, where Bonajo herself is recorded wandering the city streets blindfolded).¹ In a way, this moment captures the parallels between the psychedelic and the mediated experiences. As with LSD, wherein the pupils are dilated to absorb more light, the mediated image appears more vivid, in higher resolution, and able to represent details unseen by the naked (or distracted) eye. Or, as one subject describes the effects of ayahuasca: ‘after my first ceremony, I felt like I got this USB stick jammed in my head.’ Transcendence also implies more modest aspirations. In Marge Monko’s installation New Romance, furled and folded fashion magazines are pinned against the gallery walls, intermittently emitting puffs of air fresheners (from brands with names like Forest Waters or Lush Hideaway). Like the scents that used to be included in magazine advertisements, where you could peel off a strip of paper and sniff the particular fragrance, Monko’s works extend into the ether, diffused into the air around the unsuspecting viewer. The objects are positioned between two adjacent galleries, forcing one to walk through, to breathe in, the slowly, dissipating clouds, while on the way to the next room and Monko’s film Dear D, where a computer screen types out an email declaring the narrator’s love for ‘D’, clicking through search engines, recorded footage, Google Translate, YouTube, nytimes.com, alongside references to the Beatles, Siri Hustvedt, André Gorz, and Chris Kraus. The format neatly integrates found and foraged materials, readymade applications, databases of images and information, with that most personal and confessional of literary devices: the love letter. However, the sender – and the recipient – remain anonymous to the viewer, with any response left ultimately unclear, possibly even unreciprocated (as the speaker indicates in her concluding lines: ‘I hope that my epistle will stay between you and me and the googlemail. If the content of it makes you feel uncomfortable, I insist that you ignore it. I’ll be fine.’)² As Gene McHugh notes, the connectivity of the internet might also lead to miscommunication, to a profound misreading of the other’s feelings:
‘Hopefully, as the idea of forming bonds online through screens becomes more and more naturalised – as if they’ve always already been part of the fundamental toolbox of life – realistic social and ethical norms (along with culture that analyses and/ or mythologises these experiences) can be established to guide someone through the complexities of communicating intimately online and understanding what is ethical and what is not. The lack of these broadly defined norms creates a disconnected, two-tiered world in which some exist in a pre-internet reality, while others can only be their real selves online.’³
The internet promises everything. It shows you how to be better, how to become more fulfilled, and then insists that we achieve this unattainable goal. So, instead, this disconnection between the promise and the reality becomes a source of anxiety, a niggling suspicion that the persona that we aspire to is, if not a sham, then at least a distortion, a dissimulation. How to overcome this suspicion? One must merely cast off the real, submit fully and shamelessly to this new reality, and make a virtue of the virtual. The integration of new media into all aspects of human life, affecting and subtly transforming our modes of communication, interaction, creation and recreation, introduces another layer of reification to everyday existence.⁴ In place of a rampant, all encompassing capitalism that nevertheless preserved (or at least projected an illusion of) individual agency, this new evolutionary stage infuses the very atmosphere with seamless, ceaseless connectivity. Information proliferates, signals circulate, data is extracted. Without ever saying it directly, both artists’ works speak of this sense of relentless self-assertion, the promulgation of an artificial identity that is simultaneously ‘more’ real, ‘more’ satisfying, ‘more’ perfect.
1. The sharing of roles between the artist and performers recalls Claire Bishop’s notion of ‘delegated performance’. However, while Bishop poses this tactic as an act of ‘outsourcing’ that, at its best, “produces disruptive events that testify to a shared reality between viewers and performers”, Bonajo’s blurring of the distinction between director and actor, artist and subject, emphasises ideas of communality and collaboration inherent in the film’s exploration of the ayahuasca ritual. The viewer is left unsure as to whether Bonajo is a participant or an observer in the ceremony. Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’ in October no. 140, Spring 2012, p. 112.
2. ‘Communication on the internet is both poly-vocal and notional. One puts things online so that other people can see them, and comment on if they wish – but one has no idea, of course, who will.’ Melissa Gronlund, ‘From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art After the Internet’, in Afterall, Autumn / Winter 2014, p. 8.
3. Gene McHugh, ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships’, in You Are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester/London: Cornerhouse/SPACE, 2014), p. 34.
4. ‘Reification has proceeded to the point where the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimises or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds.’ Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 99-100.
Text: Chris Clarke
Thanks to Kranebitter Einrichtungshaus.
> Due to bad weather conditions, the performance was postponed to Sun March 25 at 5pm.
In Addie Wagenknecht’s ongoing Black Hawk Paint series, miniature drones are made to take off or land on canvases, executing simple flight commands in order to create vivid, non-representational compositions. Whereas the action paintings of seminal Abstract Expressionist artists primarily utilised gesture as an extension of the body, Wagenknecht’s employment of remote-controlled devices elongates the distance between creator and creation. The canvases resemble scarred landscapes, bombed-out cities, fields of smoke and dust, an effect heightened by her incorporation of gunpowder, aluminium oxide, heat and UV-sensitive pigments. They are lurid pink and pitch black, splattered and stippled, eerily atmospheric and crudely visceral.
Text: Chris Clarke
Since the year 2000, a new European tragedy has seen more than 33,700 registered migrants and asylum seekers perish on their way to the European continent. Europe as a by-stander to this tragic count and the fears of European citizens have been deliberated in Parts One and Two of the N E T (New European Tragedy) trilogy. The third part, which was conceived for Innsbruck, continues the artistic expedition, with God’s Entertainment broaching a new chapter: Security and Hope.
‘What is security? Is it the mere absence of fear and migration, or doesn’t it rather call for participation in democratic decisions and policy governance beyond the nation-state? Are these rights secured or can they be taken away? Part Three of the New European Tragedy portrays current developments from a pragmatic and artistic point of view. In particular, we take into consideration the pressing domestic security situation and resulting insecurity of the Austrian population. While one possible outcome would lead to right-wing populist propaganda and the formation of protective bunkers free from foreigners, another would be the improvement of civil society’s code of obedience, which must be decoded and regenerated.
Following the logic of assertion, which allows us to include both fiction and reality in our artistic endeavours, the people of Innsbruck in need of security can enjoy Western comfort in a vaulted bunker, while outside the fight for security is raging and being transmitted via live-stream.
Generously supported by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna.
Artist and filmmaker Guillermo Tellechea has revived the Cinématon project, an archive of one-shot film portraits in Super 8 format developed by Gérard Courant in the late 1970s. An individual is filmed in a single take lasting 200 seconds (the length of a Super 8mm magazine) and is given the opportunity to reveal ‘essential truths of their personality’ (Courant: 1989).
Initiated at the first biennial in 2013 and continuing since, 12 Tyrolean artists have so far been invited to give insight into their ‘true self’: Paul Albert Leitner, Dieter Henke & Marta Schreieck, Annja Krautgasser, Martin Philadelphy, Daniel Pöhacker, Eva Schlegel, Esther Stocker, Philipp Quehenberger (2013); as well as Lissie Rettenwander, Klaus Händl and Heidrun Sandbichler (2016). This year, the archive of Tyrolean artists will be expanded to include three new Cinématons:
Multimedia artist Romana Fiechtner follows a conceptual approach when exploring urban spaces, modes of communication, and isolation. She uses the span of her Cinématon to load film into her camera before, finally, snapping a shot.
Artist and graphic designer Jürgen Bauer addresses questions that concern shifts in viewing habits. He’s also interested in the perception of space and time, concepts he emphasizes in his Cinématon as he switches from black-and-white to colour.
Meanwhile, in the contribution from Peter Blaas, time seems to stand still. For several years the painter and sketch artist has recorded his impressions in small sketchbooks. His Cinématon shows him working at his kitchen table in the Old Town of Innsbruck.
Regarding the Cinématons, Tellechea captured the following thoughts in what he calls ‘Neunernotizen’ (notes of nines):
Romana Fiechtner
A starship
The densest fog of days past lifted
Above, at Ambras Castle, tiny snowflakes
The sun goes down, the camera is stuck
Souvenir shop, witty co-workers, heater, running camera, it will be close
To load the roll of film takes three minutes, the timing is perfect, click and done
Push +1
And a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ castle café
The weather is changing – man-made, that’s for sure, and faster than expected
Jürgen Bauer
Endless construction contemplation, one-and-a-half hours of total darkness, Done is the black-and-white-colour film (B/W/CF)
Lots of paper strips, red, black, white, and transparencies
The protagonist is visible and remains graphic
Lettering is key
Green camera mode, measuring light, testing, pondering, marking
Places create connections and change the way we work
Exposed – says the end of the B/W/CF – Eureka!
Just in case, a second film rolls in colour
Avoid comparisons with the greats, 84 was a joke, art opens up perspectives
Peter Blaas
An old staircase indeed
Each step tells its own history through individual creaking sounds
The ladder leading to the attic conjures a laugh
Through the window, the Old Town and the monster in the yard below
Scissors, sign, paper
An everyday mantra: sketching concepts on the kitchen table
Eneloop, Duracell, the heat is on – the camera rolls
Unbelievably good schnapps
Coffee houses used to be dull and dark, meant for making out during winter, they kept students warm
In dealing with the new technological possibilities of image production and circulation, Oliver Laric is a subversive actor. His works put our understanding of authorship and visual truth to the test by digitizing, transforming, and refining art works in the form of 3D scans that he creates using the latest reproduction techniques. His works often address practices of collective authoring, as in his long-term project of 3D scans (threedscans.com) which he allows the public to download and edit copyright-free. Saint Veronica is an ancient example of anonymous authorhood. Her attribute is the ‘acheiropoieton’, or icon ‘made without hands’: the sweat-cloth on which the face of Christ, without any intermediary handling, is seen to have been imprinted as a ‘true’ image. Laric’s St. Veronica is based on the moulding of a sculpture from a public space in Vienna. It takes up the idea of direct imprinting as supposedly authentic image creation. In Laric’s exhibition at the Riesensaal of the Hofburg, the figure of the activist Auguste Fickert (1855–1910), a champion of women’s rights, a social reformer, and journalist, is juxtaposed with the philosophical figure of Saint Veronica and the political figure of Maria Theresa. His video essay Versions explores the unbarred access to the means of producing and distributing images that we associate with ‘prosumer’ technologies. The assertion of political truth, as in Maria Theresa’s stately pictorial arrangement in the Riesensaal, gives way to the emergence of a ‘felt’ truth: a simultaneously subjective trust and distrust of circulating images.
Text: Jürgen Tabor
What significance does the romantic sublime have in a landscape developed for tourism? In 2012, a group of young photographers from Helsinki travelled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to get to the bottom of this query. The mountainous island region once inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’; for the Maanantai Collective, it served as the background for an associative, poetically absurd play with the road trip as a genre, the mountain as a leitmotif, and the horizon as a metaphor for life. The group of works Nine Nameless Mountains emerged through a collective process, and – with its diverse approaches and genres, from traditional analogue photography to video, improvised happenings, drawings, and cell phone photos – also brings the notion of authorship to the fore. In the studio, by discussing and developing their work together, the artists later created a kaleidoscopic portrait of the landscape.¹ This collective mode of working is underscored by the hanging in FOTOFORUM that has removed any definitive attribution from the works: Further I will not venture alone is a manifesto of friendship, photography, and chance.
Text: Nicole Alber
This workshop will offer an insight into the physical vocabulary and working methods of Liquid Loft, specifically in context to their latest cycle of performances “Foreign Tongues” which deals with the idea of translating language into movement. Starting with a physical warm-up, we will then go on to explore various aspects of Liquid Loft’s stylized physicality as well as its connection to voice and sound. In doing so participants will be challenged to view the body from different perspectives.
Redneck to Cyborg: a shared transformation. 2.0 is the updated version of a lecture performance commissioned by Tanzquartier Wien in 2009 in which the Vienna based Canadian performer and artist Stephanie Cumming looks on her own autobiography against the backdrop of social changes in a humorous way. From growing up in Northern Alberta, geographically and culturally isolated by the Canadian woods, to becoming the creative collaborator of Austrian choreographer Chris Haring, with whom she co-founded the Austrian dance company Liquid Loft in 2003 and still continues to work, Cumming examines her own transformation within that relationship. How do the boundaries of authorship dissolve in their joint work? And how, in turn, has this led Cumming on multiple different creative and personal trajectories, including working in film and recently becoming a mother? Redneck to Cyborg: a shared transformation. 2.0 offers a very personal glimpse into Cumming’s body of work over her nearly 20 year career.