calendario eventi  :: 

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24/11/2010

Three exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

Manfred Pernice. Sculpturama

Manfred Pernice’s sculptural works are built or assembled out of simple materials such as cardboard, chipboard, concrete, and metal, to which he adds texts, maps, and photocopies. In spite of their makeshift character, there is much in these open sculptures that recalls the formal precision of architectural models, figures, furniture, and other everyday objects.

Taking observations of the urban environment as his point of departure, Pernice highlights the inadequacies of this environment and subjects the ordering systems of modernity to a fundamental critique. To explain his specific artistic approach to these systems, he has introduced concepts such as Verdosung (canning) and Peilung (linking). The former involves isolating and preserving specific information stored in the workings of the present: original use of language, function, architectural form, and immanent norms. For the latter, Pernice connects specific places or representations of them to form complex, richly associative structures. Starting from one position, he creates a weave of spatial axes, relationships, and material references, as well as showing an increasing interest in their disintegrative potential. In this way, his works are able to develop both an autonomous form and a character that is installation-based, narrative, and site-specific.

Manfred Pernice (born 1963) lives and works in Berlin.

ARTIST TALK
Manfred Pernice with Roland Kollnitz
Thursday, December 2, 2010, 7 p.m.
An Event by the Friends of the Secession

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Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen’s works offer complex cartographies of US military policy. Using extensive series of photographs, often in large format, he reveals military machinations that are kept hidden from public view.

Paglen often uses sophisticated technology including special cameras and high-precision telescopes developed for space photography with focal lengths of up to 7000 mm—for example to take pictures from great distances of isolated military facilities in the deserts of the United States. For one of his latest works, The Other Night Sky, he used long exposure to document 189 orbiting satellites that make up a network used by the CIA for seamless global surveillance.

His works are preceded by meticulous observation, research, and data gathering. As well as the use of advanced photographic techniques and the programming of software to obtain data, his working methods include exchanging information with international networks of amateurs such as aircraft and satellite spotters. Such observers were instrumental in uncovering the secret air transfers (extraordinary rendition flights) to destinations including Guantánamo Bay, which brought prisoners to sites outside the United States for interrogation and torture. Paglen was one of the first artists to document these flights, recording his findings in his book Torture Taxi (published with A.C. Thompson, 2006).

With his work, Trevor Paglen takes his place in the history of political art activism, which has a long tradition in the United States, especially since the Vietnam War, with particularly deep roots in Berkeley, where Paglen teaches at the University of California.

For his exhibition at the Secession, Paglen will develop a new work.

Trevor Paglen (*1974 in Maryland, USA) is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer. He teaches at the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

In cooperation with Monat der Fotografie

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Maria Bussmann. Long Beach, NY

Maria Bussmann’s drawings often grow out of her readings—she works with the philosophical writings e.g. of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Ludwig Wittgenstein. The artist transfers the visual ideas that develop as she reads and processes what she reads into two-dimensional space. In her series, which are usually designed to encompass numerous drawings, she shows thought-images and chains of associations that must be understood not so much as illustrations of the source texts but rather as an open-ended commentary on and annotation to philosophical thinking. At the same time, her works represent the insistent attempt to fathom the epistemological quality of her medium, drawing.

The original textual material is thus brought to an immediacy the writings, published in books, could in this form never possess. The formal aspects of thin paper—she also uses sales-receipt paper rolls or seemingly endless paper tapes—further emphasize the ephemeral character of Maria Bussmann’s work. The artist inverts the Surrealist methods of “écriture automatique” into a process of visualization that brings the different modes of expression in language/writing, drawing, and space together, ultimately relating subjective worlds of understanding to a scientific praxis. For her exhibition in the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett, Maria Bussmann realizes a series of drawings based on a stay of several weeks in Long Beach (New York, US). The artist will also present sculptural work.

Maria Bussmann was born in Würzburg (Germany) in 1966. The artist studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and Vienna; she also studied philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Vienna, where she earned a Ph.D. Maria Bussmann lives and works in Vienna and New York.

The Secession is supported by:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Wien Kultur
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Friends of the Secession

Cooperation-, Mediapartners, Non-Cash Benefit:
Der Standard
Ö1 Club
Silver Server
Trumer Privatbrauerei

Image: Manfred Pernice 2010

For further information:
Mag. Pia Leydolt - Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34 presse@secession.at

Press conference Thursday, November 25, 2010, 10 a.m.
Opening Thursday, November 25, 2010, 7 p.m.

Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, Vienna
Hours: Tuesday through Sunday: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Admission: Adults € 5
Groups (minimum 8 persons) per person € 4
Reduced rate (students, seniors) € 4
Groups reduced (minimum 8 persons) per person € 2,5

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