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English summaries December 3 - 16
TBA21 Augarten
Sharon Lockhart – Noa Eshkol
23.11.2012 – 24. 02.2013
By Nina Schedlmayer
They twist and turn and their torsos spiral upwards; through a synchronized counter movement, the lower arms gingerly rise and fall. Sharon Lockhart’s oeuvre presented in the TBA21 demonstrates how fascinating dance can be. She filmed members of Noa Eshkol’s Chamber Dance Group, named after the Israeli choreographer.
Noa Eshkol (1924-2007) is well known for the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, which she and Avraham Wachman developed and that was inspired by the complex movements of a dancing body. Lockhart presents the dancers, performing to the beats of a metronome amidst tapestries created by the multitalented Eshkol, in a five-part film installation stretching across the generously sized rooms of the Augarten studio. The dances seem rhythmically aligned segueing from one to another.
Delicate wire and metal fabric models (reminiscent of constructivist sculptures such as those by Naum Gabo) designed by Eshkol and Wachman help visualize the notation system that forms the basis of the choreographies. They, too, can be found in Lockhart’s exhibition – photographed prosaically, stringently, and retained – in the style of scientific images. The artist positioned her tapestries on a base – cheerful, careless, irregular patchwork that breaks up the stringency of the choreography.
In the international world of art, Noa Eshkol had almost fallen into oblivion, yet her work proves to be fruitful and instructive. Lockhart can claim the credit for bringing Eshkol’s work out of the woodwork. However, her own artistic handwriting recedes into the background behind all her protagonist's fascinating objects; she behaves in a profusely reserved manner. Clearly, this coolness is also an aesthetic decision; even if its now mainstream. And that’s why this well-worth seeing exhibition is more Eshkol than Lockhart.
TBA21 Augarten
1020 Vienna, Scherzergasse 1A
Tel: +43 1 513 98 56 – 24
email: exhibitions@TBA21.org
www.TBA21.org
Opening hours: Daily 11.00 -19.00 hours, Fri 11.00 – 22.00 hours
Gabriele Senn Galerie
Hans Weigand/Elfie Semotan
16.11.2012 – 12.01.2013
By Goschka Gawlik
Basically, we are living in a completely aestheticized world in which art is defined by brilliant and (too) exuberant renditions. One example of such a temporary phenomenon is the superb exhibition Lucas, Bosch, Gelatin shown in the Kunsthalle Krems. Another example of this phenomenon is the exhibition Hans Weigand and Elfie Semotan in the Gallery Gabriele Senn.
The main reason for the two artists to collaborate was their encounter in the gallery, in which each of them is currently presenting their most recent work. Both artists are well known internationally. Weigand is an established artist of his generation, Semotan a renowned Austrian advertising photographer. Both are known as audacious and militant personalities full of innovative ideas. It comes as no surprise that they agreed to jointly finish a picture in this exhibition, as a kind of proof of the unambiguity of their elective affinity.
Following his last opulent paint collages and panoramas with dystopian content Hans Weigand surprises by reducing his otherwise monumental means of expression. He shows two almost monochrome waves (2012), similar to the style of Japanese woodcuts. Placed opposite is a group of objects made of styrodur, so-called breakwater, with a shimmering silver surface.
While Weigand’s work is devoid of any humans, Elfie Semotan, for the first time in her oeuvre, deals with female nudes to oppose the flood of nudity in today’s consumer world and the “latent depreciation of the female image as a mere object of (male) desire.” The timeless effect of Semotan’s nude photographs is the result of applying an old technology. Her work, depicting a 50 year-old friend lying on a mattress in an unspectacular room, evades looking into the camera; she is attractive but in no way immaculate. Semotan presents the nudes beyond the current canon in which physical perfection prevails. For her, a woman is not an object of exposition, but a live subject of self-dramatization.
If nude photography can be seen as a discourse about the dominating power structures and culture in a society – if it does not only deal with formation or shadow and light games – then both artists place sexuality back into the metaphoric language of their art.
Gabriele Senn Galerie
1040 Vienna, Schleifmühlgasse 1a
Tel: +43 1 535 99 30
Fax: +43 1 535 99 29
Email: galerie.senn@aon.at
www.galeriesenn.at
Opening hours: Tue – Fri 14.00 – 18.00 hours, Sat: 11.00 – 16.00 hours
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Privacy
01.11.2012 – 03.02.2012
By Daniela Gregori
“Privacy is an obsolete social norm” Mark Zuckerberg commented on privacy and its protection. He would know. But Facebook is not the only source through which we learn things about our fellow men that we seldom want to know. At times, one could feel embarrassed for others. The Schirn Kunsthalle devotes its exhibition “Privacy” to the phenomenon of the denouement of privacy to post-privacy – not in everyday life, but in art.
Already for years, Nan Goldin has been offering us insight into the activities of her milieu, Sophie Calle masterfully stages her fictitious private life and, already in 1959, Stan Brakhage filmed the birth of his daughter. In 1963, Andy Warhol watched over the sleep of his friend John Giorno, Tracey Emin proves that one is eligible for the Turner Prize with an unmade, diversely utilized bed and Ai Weiwei lets us take part in his life, his environment, and the injustices he faces via twitter.
The at all times accessible plethora of images in digital media turns out to be a true repository for comparable arrangements claiming to be art. After all, everyone takes pains to appear either especially distinct or at least especially original and, not surprisingly, these characteristics of singularity manifested in the Internet can fill entire walls if not rooms. For example, “The Unconscious” by Mark Wallinger shows an assemblage of people who fell asleep in means of public transport. Mike Bouchet’s “Untitled Video” (2011), an all-over comprised of 10,000 stamp-sized single shots contains adult content. And in the midst of this closeness to real life and absolute privacy, you will find - unmediated, uncommented and totally out of place - Birgit Jürgenssen’s housewive’s kitchen apron from 1974.
In 1984, the exhibition “Arena of Privacy” in the Munich Kunstverein also dealt with this topic, however in a much less open-minded way. Jürgenssen, with her multifaceted work would have fit in perfectly. Lets consider it a late form of redemption.
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
60311 Frankfurt am Main, Römerberg
email: welcome@schirn.de
www.schirn.de
Opening hours: Tue – Sun 11.00 – 19.00 hours, Wed – Sat 11.00 – 20.00 hours
Galerie Michaela Stock
Marko Zink – Im Kurhotel
14.11.2012 – 12. 01.2013
By Margareta Sandhofer
Due to its omnipresence, the transience of earthly existence remains to be a continuously attractive topic. And it is not necessarily logical that focussing on vanitas in fine arts almost exclusively refers to the joyous facets of the same. Marko Zink’s photo work presented at the Gallery Michaela Stock also involves additional aspects.
Nothing in this genre is new: a barely or possibly unidentifiable person in a bleak, perceptibly abandoned building, a former luxury health resort is shown on a large reproduction with a “poor” resolution, nostalgic and sentimental, something people enjoy. Add a touch of eroticism and some humour, mysterious encryption of the spatial situation: these are effective exercises, well-established, pleasing, and easily accessible and therefore successful – subtly enriched with open ambiguity by Marko Zink.
Especially the presented selection of photographs from the series “Im Kurhotel” (In the Health Resort) stands – similar to film stills – for the hidden stories. Unspoken or unpronouncable narrations appear as the shortest moments of encounters. These are encounters in a reciprocal relationship between three components, the depicted person as the protagonist, the strange environment, which has the same relevance as the human actor, and the photographer. The close-ups directly involve the recipients and, at first glance, Marko Zink imposes the photographer’s own position. At a second glance, the formal staging and treatment of the film material is obvious and creates a distance.
Zink made his analogue photos with a “cooked” film, which was scanned after it was developed. The damaged film is hardly durable, the treatment has left its traces on the photos: colour nuances have atomized into small colour dots, some parts are fuzzy and blurred. Formally, the “poor” quality is used as a form of exaggeration. Content-related it could be considered as a simulation of human memory.
This is what the selected motives and excerpts suggest. Rooms, people and details as well as the plot, only appear as fragments – the big picture remains unclear and provokes associations – both melancholic and painful. Human perspectives superimpose the technical perspective of the camera, human proportions and shapes find analogies in the furniture. With its temporary existence, in essential vulnerability, the human presence lends the environment some substance, and on the other hand the individual is charged with the flawed atmosphere of its environment. Therefore, the individual as the subject and the hotel and its furniture as the object can no longer be separated.
But above all, instantaneousness dominates the respective situation. The illustrated encounter is seen as an ephemeral phenomenon that is vanishing; deprived of a timely definition. It is not relevant if it was really experienced, available at present, or visionary. What remains are traces in memory, mysterious rudiments, the original absconds – just like Marko Zink’s “cooked” film will fall apart anytime soon.
Galerie Michaela Stock
1040 Vienna, Schleifmühlgasse 18
Tel: +43-1-920 77 78
email: info@galerie-stock.net
www.galerie-stock.net
Opening hours: Mon - Fri 15:00 hours -19:00 hours, Sat 11:00 hours -15:00 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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