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7/2/2012

Heidrun Holzfeind

Bawag Contemporary, Wien

Curated by Christine Kintisch

The Austrian artist Heidrun Holzfeind’s work has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Based on theoretical considerations on architecture as a social space and the reflection of power relations in urban systems, Holzfeind questions the utopian promises of modernist residential buildings. Closely combining this interest in architecture and urban development with issues of individual life plans, she has produced a highly original and unmistakable oeuvre.

“My works are portraits of simple persons at a point in their lives at which they start thinking about their achievements, goals, hopes, and place in society,” the artist writes about her critical view of social structures. In her works, she unflappably fathoms the boundaries between history and identity, personal fate and today’s political narratives, reality and fiction.

Her video work Colonnade Park (2011), for example, portrays Mies van der Rohe’s modernist residential buildings in Newark though interviews with their inhabitants. The three glass and steel towers built between 1954 and 1960 mark the beginning of Newark’s urban renewal. The interviews with the inhabitants focusing on their life in these classically modernist highrises are confronted with views of the flats and from the windows.

CU (Mexico City, August 2006) and Mexico 68 from 2007, a slide installation and video interviews dealing with the Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City, the main campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, combine architectural shots and video interviews with activists of the student movement of 1968, which has had a formative influence on an entire generation. With these works, Heidrun Holzfeind has essentially contributed to the rephrasing of documentary issues and redefined the use of photography and video between art and social practice.

The BAWAG Contemporary exhibition centers on a new group of works concerned with the Austrian architect Ernst Schwadron (Wien 1896 – 1979 New York). Ernst Schwadron was the eldest son of the cofounder of the construction and ceramics company Brüder Schwadron, whose early showroom houses the BAWAG Contemporary exhibition spaces today. The architect’s flat was located in the penthouse of the same building on Franz-Josefs-Kai 3. Ernst Schwadron saw himself forced to emigrate to New York in 1938 and built his own house near the city in the 1940s. In her new group of works, Heidrun Holzfeind primarily explores references of space and time.

Image: Heidrun Holzfeind, Videostill aus: Colonnade Park, Video, 54 min, 2011, © Heidrun Holzfeind

Press Preview February 8, 2012, 10:30 am
Opening February 8, 2012, 7:00 pm

Bawag Contemporary
Franz Josefs Kai 3 - Wien
Opening hours: Daily 2:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Free admission

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