ARTISTS
Landschaftsdarstellungen nehmen in der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung Südafrikas eine bedeutsame Rolle ein, waren sie doch lange Zeit die vorherrschende Ausdrucksform südafrikanischer KünstlerInnen (vgl. Godby 2010).
Einerseits gibt die sprichwörtliche Popularität figurativer oder narrativer Abbildungen einen Hinweis auf deren sentimentale Aufladung. Andererseits deutet der konstruierte Charakter von Landschaft(en) die ideologische Funktion von Bildern an, ihre Vereinnahmung durch politische oder religiöse Bewegungen.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Date of release: January 31th 2011
Edited by Fotogalerie Wien
Contextual essays by Claudia Marion Stemberger
INTERVIEW
Since 1997, The Republic of South Africa has boasted one of the most progressive constitutions worldwide, particularly with regard to women's rights. Nevertheless, beyond bureaucracy and similar to countless other societies 'here and there', not only daily life and statistics but the art world as well reflect persistent gender-specific discrimination to this day.
Regarding the constriction of women's rights during the apartheid regime, a historic look at female photographers in South Africa might offer an insight into how narratives might have been written, neglecting their specific influence.
CONTEXTUAL ESSAY
Judith Fegerls performative Installation ermöglicht den BesucherInnen, die imaginierten Grenzen zwischen Kunst und Leben zu hinterfragen und sich selbst als autopoietischer Teil der ephemeren Skulptur zu konstituieren. Die Passagegalerie als Blutspendezentrale markiert dabei einen Hub, einen Knotenpunkt als Sammelpunkt: Verschlungene Stromkabel und Gummischläuche bilden die Schnittstelle zu den Blut spendenden Menschen und formieren einen Kreislauf.
EDITORSHIP
Exhibition catalogue, edited by Christiane Krejs and Claudia Marion Stemberger
Date of release: June 9 2011
CONTEXTUAL ESSAY
For the final show in this series, IDENTITY III – POSITIONING, the curatorial collective at Fotogalerie Wien has invited artists who deal critically with the positioning of the subject in late modernism. While in early modernism, collective identities provided a secure framework, one in which individual identities also had their place, formerly stabilizing factors (such as class, nation, ethnicity, culture, religion or gender) are subject to tendencies that dissolve such categories in late modernism. More than ever, the relevance of power structures thereby comes to the fore, in which the issue of social belonging drastically reveals itself as a struggle for inclusion and exclusion.
EDITORSHIP
Exhibition catalogue
Date of release: May 6th 2010
Edited by Claudia Marion Stemberger and Kathrin Becker
PEER REVIEWED ARTICLE
Since early modernity, art, philosophy, and science have appropriated the potential of disorder inherent in chance as a principle of innovation. In contemporary aesthetic discourse, turbulences of chance are operationalized by artists for their critique of causality, calculability and subjective command of action, and bear a radicalised signature.
Keywords: chance, exponential increase of chance, contingency, performance, film, Joel and Ethan Coen, Xavier Le Roy.
INTERVIEW
Portia Malatjie in conversation with Claudia Marion Stemberger about her curatorial projects in South Africa:
I avoided a curatorial practice that results in ethnic marketing due to fixing "the others" (supposedly emerging) art practice by means of manifesting stereotypes - such as presuming art practice(s) as expression of a (post) post-Apartheid society for example. Accordingly, in Alterating Conditions the artists were not "performing their passports", nor was I.
CONTEXTUAL ESSAY
The topic of the second exhibition, Identity II – Forming Identity, questions ambivalent models of interpreting the formation of identity, which, depending on the context, diverge between identification and ideologization:
According to Jan Assmann, collective identity is only “as strong or as weak as it is alive in the thoughts and actions of the group members […]”. It is the expression of that which connects people to each other through homogeneous self- and cultural identifiers and is how individuals identify themselves.
CONTEXTUAL ESSAY
The initial exhibition in the series, Identity I – Biography, reflects upon the relationship of biography and identity, as the ongoing process of day-to-day identity negotiation. How does one deal with biographical self-awareness in today's society?
The selected artworks demonstrate how, for any phase of life and developmental task at hand, there exist various contradictory and divergent identity fragments that dominate in any given biography; and these fragments of self must be synthesized through the interplay of demands coming from within and without.
ARTISTS
An icy white blanket that covers the remainders of the now dead flora beneath it: life stilled. A frozen surface that breaks under bursting fresh innards. Splatters of blood cover the snowy white ground.
From the gutted animal situs the lobes of the liver and the gushing intestines glow, lung and heart run along the gristly esophagus: vital organs in humans and cattle alike. On this runway of multiple innards, lined up like a chain of pearls, Judith Pichlmüller walks unerringly and respectfully in her high heels.