calendario eventi  :: 

X

21/9/2007

Volksgarten

Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz

Politics of Belonging

Curators: Adam Budak, Peter Pakesch, Katia Schurl

Participating artists: Absalon (IL), Pawel Althamer (PL), airline (CH), Bik Van der Pol (NL), Thomas Hirschhorn (CH), Pierre Huyghe (FR), Helmut and Johanna Kandl (AT), Sharon Lockhart (US), Gordon Matta-Clark (US), Jean-Luc Moulène (FR), Los Carpinteros (CU), Maria Papadimitriou (GR), resanita (AT), Daniel Roth (DE), Özlem Sulak (TR), Stephen Willats (UK), Manfred Willmann (AT)

In a world of hysterically accelerated globalisation, the issues of hyper-locality and the community-generated space are getting on a particular urgency. Such urgency is at the centre of the exhibition Volksgarten. Politics of Belonging which aims at portraying two districts of the micro-city organism of Graz, Lend and Gries, in the nearest neighbourhood of Kunsthaus Graz, on a division line between two distinctive and diversified parts of the city. The Volksgarten -- as a title concept -- implicates an abstract and a concrete site of an open and democratic space where a variety of identities is being shaped and consequently negotiated. Ethnically complex, multicultural and socially diverse, Lend and Gries function as a metaphor of urban, political, cultural and national transformations. Geometry of difference brought in by a dense population of immigrants, visible signs of economic failure, thus generated social frustration and division constitute the everyday-li fe aspects of newly born and adapted economies.

The exhibition investigates identification systems and strategies of belonging within given hybrid neighbourhoods and communities. What are the forms of co-habitation? How social utopias are being constructed? What are the possible scenarios of collective and communal life? How (public) intimacy endures in the landscape of group-like common-life impositions and memberships? Volksgarten is a playground where a complex production of social space occurs: here, the legality and legitimacy of space are tested; here, too, space’s accessibility is challenged through a dense network of multiply human relations on the crossway of local and global economies. Last but not least, this exhibition explores the role of an art institution, such as Kunsthaus Graz and its landmark architecture (designed by star architects, Peter Cook and Colin Fournier) as a possible and potential catalyst for changes and revitalisation of the troubled districts. This very architecture had been baptized by the architects with a nickname Friendly Alien. Such oscillation between estrangement and friendliness marks not only the formal solutions for the Kunsthaus' architecture; it also describes very well its psychology and the external resonance.

Following Jean-Luc Nancy's elaborations of community and his grammar of "with", the artists of this exhibition perform a desire to rework or rather unwork the very construct of the (real or imaginative) community as the dominant Western political formation, founded upon an exclusionary myth of national, rational or religious unity in order to accommodate more inclusive and plural forms of Being-in-common and of dwelling together in the world. Here, there is a collection of belongings as mosaics of with: the very properties that constitute the identity (folds of proximity and distance) but also the constructions (modulations and tensions of proximity and distance) that shape their politics and mode of operating.

The Swiss art collective, airline is setting up a place of encounter (airtrain, 2007) in the Grazer Volksgarten, inviting visitors to take part in a variety of activities and seeking lively interaction with the local residents. Airline is taking on a journey into a life of real communities, elaborating (interdisciplinary) agenda of intercultural practice and mentality's training for an open guesthouse where hospitality and authenticity of a minimal gesture operate beyond any particular politics of belonging. Here, at the airtrain station in the Volksgarten, there is a construction site of a ready-made belonging, ephemeral in its existence, though elemental in its essence, half-way utopian though haptic too. The Greek artist, Maria Papadimitriou is assembling an orchestra composed of immigrants (Volksgarten Orchestra, 2007), which will premiere at the Grazer Concert Hall, Orpheum on the day after the exhibition opening.

The immigrants' polyphony of diverse musical styles, trad itions, voices, sounds, instruments, etc. is a convincing expression of possibility of a new language, a new communication, opening up new encounters, waking up (social and individual) potentialities. Meanwhile, the Austrian artistic duo Johanna and Helmut Kandl take the happiness of the people of Lend and Gries as their theme. Brightly coloured balloons will be handed out, inscribed in 15 different languages with a bold assertion: We will live here and be happy, 2007. Such is Kandl's response to the exhibition’s topic of belonging and a specific ethnic complexity of Lend and Gries: a self-imposed statement of a peculiar simplicity, if not elemental sincere obviousness – a necessity of happiness as a basic and sufficient condition of life, its sense, feeling and quality, in a place which due to various reasons happened to become your (second) home.

In the exhibition space of the Kunsthaus Graz, the theme of living together is dealt with at a general level. Sharon Lockhart's field-works research both the mechanisms of collectivity and the subjectivity of an individual, conditioned by the communities' belonging and identification. Conceived in a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Lockhart's film, Pine Flat is the artist’s first project to focus on a community in her native country, the United States. In a typical for her, formally concise but intimate, manner, the artist traces and records the contemporary rural life with a particular attention paid to the interactions and behaviour of the local community's children, engaged in everyday activities played out in a picturesque natural landscape immersed in seasonal changes. Pine Flat is Lockhart's most sincere to date and almost autobiographical collective journey. The Turkish artist, ouzlem Sula k revisits the biography of her own family in order to depict the poignancy of 20th century political and social history.

Her video work “Granny” is a private, captivating confession of those who survived a true gehenna of European forced migration and ethnic relocation. Realized for the exhibition “Volksgarten”, Thomas Hirschhorn’s sculpture “Concept-Car” is a journey into the artist’s own identity and its rich network of connections and conceptual itineraries. “Who am I? Where do I stand? What is my belief?” asks the artist in a labyrinthine diagram which serves as an engine of his vehicle of concepts and precious possessions. Here is the archive of private mythology, intellectual skeleton of artist’s identity and of his dense work between distinctive subjectivity and external influence. As a catalogue of references and tools, “Concept Car” focuses on the understanding of belonging(s) as an intellectual property thus provides the viewer with a unique insight into the artist’s atelier and the constitutive production process. Stephen Willats’ two series from the end of the 70s, “Sorting Out Other People’s Lives” (1978) and “A Conflict of Identities” (1979) aim at weaving the complex fabrics of belonging on the crossway of personal desire and communal expectation and thus developing new codes for social structure and the role of an individual.

---

Martin Kern and Georg Kettele

intermediate, KMKG BIX Project 2007

1 kilometre 28 metres, 5 minutes 26 seconds, more than 100 buildings become 16,300 images. Images that never look alike. Always new moments, always different people make an endless collage. Scenarios of a day – image per image – are combined to a new whole. What connects each of them is the rigid movement of the tram. A ride along the boundaries of Lend and Gries as a part and as an observer of this urban structure, until you leave it to come back later.

Press contact
Dr. Doris Lind T: +43 316/8017-9213 F: +43 316/8017-9212 E-Mail: presse@kunsthausgraz.at
Sabine Bergmann T: +43 316/8017-9211 F: +43 316/8017-9213 E-Mail: sabine.bergmann@museum-joanneum.at

Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum
Lendkai, 1 - Graz
Opening hours
Tue – Sun 10am-6pm
Admission
Adults: € 7,00
Groups of 7 or more, senior citizens, people on military or alternative service, disabled people: € 5,50

stampa

permanent link