030510: MAK – Applied Arts / Contemporary Art Josef Dabernig

MAK – Applied Arts / Contemporary Art Josef Dabernig – Excursus on Fitness 07.04.10 – 12.09.10 “Keep fit” with Dabernig The actors in Dabernig’s film “Excursus on Fitness” present themselves pleasantly un-enthusiastic while doing their workout. The film was produced especially for the same-named exhibition at the MAK. The largely minimalistic exercises are performed by Dabernig’s family members, artist friends as well as Dabernig himself in a bleak gym with a view onto a Viennese block of council flats, constituting the antithesis to the trendy fitness studios and their body-fixated customers. The idealisation of athletic bodies, which is usually accompanied by the denunciation of those who do not meet these standards, is evidently not Dabernig’s topic. Instead he directs the focus on the “geometry and gestures and glances” of those involved, and, together with the spatial givens of the gym, creates an architecture of bodies. Dabernig consciously centres on an ambivalent sentiment: it remains unclear if the actors enjoyed the sportive activities or undertook them unwillingly. The film, positioned in the centre of the exhibition, becomes an “expanded sculpture”, and at the same time it reflects Dabernig’s inclination for “modules, series, as well as formally minimal and precisely arranged structures”. The sparse setting, along a consistent visual axis with five bunk-like areas, also includes black-and-white as well as colour photographs reminding of the 1960’s. All this expands the associations made between body and architecture: e.g. with photographs of abandoned sports stands and barrier tapes marking off a bicycle race. The short film “Parking” (2003), dealing with subordination and humiliation among “consenting adults”, completes Dabernig’s first institutional solo exhibit in Vienna since 1993. By Susanne Jäger MAK-Applied Arts / Contemporary Art 1010 Vienna, Stubenring 5 Tel: + 43 1 711 36 – 0 Fax: + 43 1 711 36 – 227 http://www.mak.at Opening hours: Tue (MAK Nite): 10 a.m. – Midnight, Wed – Sun 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville

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030510

MAK - Museum für angewandte Kunst
1010 Wien, Stubenring 5
Tel: +43 1 711 36-0, Fax: +43 1 713 10 26
Email: office@mak.at
http://www.mak.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di 10-21, Mi-So 10-18 h

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