10 – 12 October 2007
White lies | Caroline Heider
7 – 9 November 2007
Libellula | Karin Ferrari
14 – 16 November 2007
Curator-in-residence 07|08:
Diana Baldon
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Schillerplatz 3 | Aula
1010 Vienna | Austria
Phone (+43 1) 588 16-0
http://www.akbild.ac.at
In the winter term 06|07, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has started a new exhibition series with its Presentation Space (Demonstrationsraum). The plan to develop this series arose from the consideration to offer students the possibility for a more intense cooperation with a curator beyond the »curatorial project« or former annual exhibition. A curator-in-residence, who will be appointed annually, will invite the students to evolve, realize, present, and discuss their ideas and concepts. Situated at the interface between academic studies and exhibition practice, the series will provide students with a space of their own and confront them with a larger public at the same time.
For the crows to pluck | Mathias Pöschl
Mainly working with drawing and sculpture, Pöschl’s practice brings together a formalist approach with ideas that relate to cultural borrowing and social injustice. His works explore the paradoxes of politically active groups like the Black Panther Party that invoked militancy to fight for equal rights while being caught up in homophobic tendencies. Such collisions articulate also in the minimalist visual language of his works, where images are deliberately left unfinished or coloured using materials such as shoe polish to increase the effect of their thick and opaque black tones. The works and the title of the exhibition take inspiration from Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” (1939) in which poplar trees were used for gallows to hang Afro-Americans, whereby now they are used to fabricate commercial pallets. Pöschl has reassembled one of them into a gallows, presented on top of the collapsed structure of the Demoraum transformed into a podium.
White lies | Caroline Heider
Heider’s versatile practice is critically responsive to the cultural context it is presented in. Her ongoing photo series “Faltbilder” formally mimics the style of commercial photography used in fashion and advertising. However, her images are altered by folds as those in clothing that hide the subjects from the camera eye. As a result, subject matters vacillate, transfigured to the point to become grotesque, a process that confuses the hierarchical order between foreground and background, making viewers aware of how this governs space in images. The exhibition centres on Heider’s interest in the famous character of Collodi’s children novel. Differently from Pinocchio’s habit to deceive for no reason, Heider’s works refer to harmless lies that extend to a cultural history according to which images are no longer produced to convince – and for that matter, to lie – but to impress. Readapting the end of Pinocchio’s story, she incorporates the material properties of the Demoraum, piercing through its wooden structure with a nose stretched to a tree branch.
Libellula | Karin Ferrari
Moving in a field of improvisation, Ferrari’s practice encompasses many abstract registers bringing together a variety of painting styles. Her approach in experimenting with different techniques impresses for the spontaneity and enthusiasm with which paintings, drawings and collages become a conglomerate of energetic, colourful images. The solidity and forcefulness of her graphic lines made by masking tape, graphite and charcoal, loosens up within the shimmering, atmospheric effects of colour fields obtained with chalky pastels, oils and acrylics. Although revisiting precursors like Renaissance painter Titian and his method of multi-layering surfaces with diverse techniques simultaneously, Ferrari’s gestural mark making gives birth to graffiti-inspired forms that fragment into a vibrant, all-over undergrowth and demonstrate her freedom in representing images that distress the working processes of painting.
Image above:
Photo: Lisa Rastl
