translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
281013: Ostlicht: Anja Manfredi – Images of Movement
Ostlicht
Anja Manfredi – Images of Movement
03.10.2013 – 21.12.2013
A hysteric in a carpet shop
By Nina Schedlmayer
The apparatus is somewhat reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s sculptures. However, it’s a corset lacing machine, along which the performer moves – she turns neatly on her own axis, laughs, falters briefly: counteracts the brutal apparatus with floating ease. Her neighbour – the artist, Katrina Daschner – also handles the lacing machine with great ease: attired in a flowered dress and hat, she laughs like a coquettish silent film diva and finally disappears after she has taken off the dress down to her hips. And then there's that woman who moves her arms and legs elegantly along a ballet barre.
Anja Manfredi's projection of three 16mm films is the core piece of her exhibition in Ostlicht, a sort of early-mid-career survey. Starting with this, the artist transferred the movements in abstract notations onto paper as well as onto curtains which, in turn, should allude to a cinema and make the show rhythmical. In between she presents her meanwhile well-known "Archive of Movements", her re-enactments of historic dancers – collages on which, together with her colleague, Roberta Lima, she imitates Isadora Duncan – as well as newer works such as a recent self-portrait.
Manfredi's works definitely have comedic moments such as when she caricatures Duncan's already very expressive gestures in an exaggerated manner. But it's more than just that, it's about measuring the body, about gender stereotypes – wonderfully exaggerated for example, in the series "Viennese Carpet Shop", in which she lets a man pose as an hysteric. Yet the exhibition is somewhat bloodless when it comes to reflecting on the medium of photography: photograms from film material that has been "thrown back onto the photographic carrier” – neither Manfredi nor art needs these sort of things.
Ostlicht
1100 Vienna, Absberggase 27
Tel: +43 1 996 20 66
Fax : +43 1 996 20 66 - 66
info@ostlicht.at
www.ostlicht.at
Opening hours: Wed - Sat: 12 noon - 18.00 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
281013
Ostlicht
1100 Wien, Absberggasse 27
Tel: +43 1 9962066 , Fax: +43 1 9962066-66
Email: info@ostlicht.at
http://www.ostlicht.at
Öffnungszeiten: Mi-Sa 12-18 h,
Bibliothek Mi-Fr 12-18 h
Ostlicht
1100 Wien, Absberggasse 27
Tel: +43 1 9962066 , Fax: +43 1 9962066-66
Email: info@ostlicht.at
http://www.ostlicht.at
Öffnungszeiten: Mi-Sa 12-18 h,
Bibliothek Mi-Fr 12-18 h