calendario eventi  :: 

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9/9/2014

Three exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

UTOPIAN PULSE - FLARES IN THE DARKROOM
A research project by Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler
In collaboration with a group of international artist-curators

We understand "Utopia" as an always incomplete alternative, the invocation within the given world of something incompatible with, and hostile to, given conditions. It is a negation of the given and a recognition of "something missing," but also a necessarily imperfect assertion of that which is not—yet.

The work follows utopian projections that serve the purposes of secession from and resistance to our particular present. The "negative" or "critical" version of the utopian "impulse" is not just a matter of satire, or listing what's wrong with the world as though listing it could change it. Utopia, rather, is the assertion of the unrealized in and against the real.

The first public appearance of UTOPIAN PULSE – FLARES IN THE DARKROOM was SALON KLIMBIM, orchestrated by the artist-curator Fahim Amir and Ines Doujak on January 23, 2014 in correspondence with Oliver Ressler. Between February and September 2014 a series of 7 large-scale banners (3,4 x 9 meters) has been presented on the façade of the Secession. URGENT ALTERNATIVES: UTOPIAN MOMENTS related to the uprisings and social movements that have emerged in recent years. The artists were invited to focus on the utopian pulse in these actions and movements. All the artists have in common that they are directly involved in the protests they focus on in their banner, or talk from a clear, unequivocal position of solidarity with them. Banners have been commissioned by Katarzyna Winiecka (February 2014), Halil Altindere (March 2014), Wealth of Negations (April 2014), Nobodycorp. Internationale Unlimited (May 2014), Etcétera (June 2014), Oreet Ashery (July 2014) and Daniela Ortiz (August 2014).

UTOPIAN PULSE – FLARES IN THE DARKROOM as an exhibition at the Secession is divided into seven salons. It seems urgent precisely when the potential imperfectly expressed in the salon is seen as neither a proto-public sphere—that is, one stage in an orderly evolution towards universal convivial conversation—nor pure "courtly" proprietorship, but rather as a partial breach of the prevailing order of class and gender, a disruption that cannot become the public norm because it prefigures total upheaval of what constitutes the "public" and is instead a place for the monstrous birth of new alliances.

UTOPIAN PULSE – FLARES IN THE DARKROOM brings together international cultural producers who have substantial artistic and curatorial practices. Over two months, they will show and discuss works of other artists in the gallery of the Secession every week. The contributions of the individual artist-curators will not be shown sequentially, but will productively interact with one another. The salons will open in weekly intervals. The outcomes—whatever their form—will constitute a collective challenge to the constituent roles of social actors within the field of art in more complex ways than simply as "artists," "curators," and "viewers", in order to imagine new forms of exchange.

The sequence of exhibitions at the Secession consists of Salon Public Happiness (curated by Christoph Schäfer, September 11 – 16, 2014), Salon-E-Girdbad [Salon of the Whirlwind] (curated by Mariam Ghani, September 17 – 23, 2014), Salon Orizzonti Occupati [Occupied Horizons] (curated by Bert Theis, September 24 – 30, 2014), Salon Fluchthilfe [Salon Escape Aid] (curated by Zanny Begg, October 01 – 07, 2014), Salon DADADA (AND AND AND with Ben Morea and friends, October 08 – 14, 2014), Cuartos de Utopía [Rooms of Utopia] (curated by Pedro G. Romero/Máquina P.H., October 15 – 21, 2014) and Salón de Belleza [Beauty Salon] (curated by Miguel A. López, October 22 – November 02, 2014).

While the exhibitions are on view, large banners created by the artist-curators will be displayed on the Secession's façade, also in weekly alternation.

Utopia is secession without instructions.
http://utopian-pulse.org

Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) AR 183-G21
The project will be continued in a new configuration at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart in 2015.

In February 2015 the volume on the exhibition project will be published: UTOPIAN PULSE – FLARES IN THE DARKROOM, Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler (eds.). 288 p., London: Pluto Press, 2015

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DIANA AL-HADID
The Fates

Curated by Annette Südbeck

Diana Al-Hadid's sculptures, drawings, and panels merge figuration and abstraction. Her art involves a wide range of materials—from steel and fiberglass to gold leaf and pigment—and spans different eras by making reference to historic models or integrating them into its architectonic structures.

At the Secession, Diana Al-Hadid presents her most recent ensemble, The Fates, which comprises large sculptures and two inset panels for which she took inspiration from classical sculpture and European—more particularly, early northern Renaissance—painting. Her three-dimensional interpretations incorporate architectonic structures and compositions grounded on basic geometric forms as well as landscapes and figurative motifs from these masterpieces. The artist employs traditional sculptural practices in experimental fashion, often by shifting elements back and forth between flatness and spatial depth, toying with proportions and scales, and exploring the limits of gravity in constructions that seem to defy it. The sculpture placed at the center of the gallery, Phantom Limb (2014) for example, appears to hover between construction and decay. Ascending like flights of stairs and falling apart at the same time, its platforms are caught in a moment of fragile balance: everything seems afloat and in motion.

Diana Al-Hadid's works result from an open creative process. Her revisions and reconfigurations toe the fine line between fidelity to the historic sources and a more liberal recasting:

"These references do not always remain perfectly intact, sometimes I lose the trace altogether, but a small gesture remains. (…) What I have learned from starting with these paintings is that so little is needed to suggest a character or a scene, such is our familiarity with the tilt of Mary's neck for example. Other times, the scene is obscured and what remains is a few faded arches of an architectural compound that once was highly detailed and populated. I am interested in how much an image can be 'stressed' before it begins to forget its origins." (Diana Al-Hadid)

The two free-standing wall panels in the exhibition, Still Life (2014) and Sleep Walker (2014), which are viewable from both sides, are similarly paradigmatic examples of this approach. The motif of the first, a woman stuck in a mountain, is drawn from the painting Allegory of Chastity (1475) by Hans Memling, while the architectural structure of the mountain resembles Pieter Bruegel's painting The Tower of Babel (1563). As a counterpart the second panel is based on an ancient relief of a woman walking who was identified around 1900 as Gradiva.

The character of Gradiva, the "woman who walks through walls", is an invention of the novelist Wilhelm Jensen (Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy, published in German in 1903 and in English translation in 1918). She became famous through Sigmund Freud's analysis of the novel (Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva,' 1907) and was subsequently adopted by the Surrealists as their muse. The relief named after her was reconstructed in the early twentieth century out of fragments scattered across several collections and is now at the Museo Chiaramonti, one of the Vatican Museums in Rome.

In Gradiva, Diana Al-Hadid has chosen a mythological figure whose history is marked by several phases of recollection, oblivion, and repeated re-invention. She may also be read as a metaphor of Al-Hadid's approach to art. Layer by layer, she alters and reimagines her motifs, allowing the passage of time to imprint its trace in the accumulated strata—as the title of the ensemble also suggests: the Parcae or Fates, the goddesses of destiny, symbolize the future, present, and past.

PUBLICATION
An artist's book to be published in conjunction with the exhibition will take the form of a notebook containing reference pictures, sketches, and photographs tracing the genesis of the works on display.

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CINTHIA MARCELLE
Dust Never Sleeps

Curator: Jeanette Pacher

Cinthia Marcelle has often staged situations and performative acts in public spaces, interventions designed to transform quotidian actions into poetic events. Video and photography are her chosen artistic media of documentation. On several occasions, the artist has explored the ruin as an allegory of history divorced from any conception of beauty, drawing on Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as a process of inexorable decline. One material that recurs throughout Marcelle's oeuvre is dust. She sprays the loose particles into clearly delimited spaces, where they settle to demarcate a new space. At the same time, the deposited layers of dust and grime embody the materialization of time.

For her installation Dust Never Sleeps (2014), Cinthia Marcelle transforms the Secession's Grafisches Kabinett into a seemingly abandoned space in which everything—the floor, walls, and ceiling, the windows, doors, and light fixtures—is thoroughly covered in black soot. Brighter contours stand out; variations in the density of the accumulated material generate a sort of drawing in space, not unlike a photographic negative. Only a narrow corridor has been left blank and is open to visitors. The sense of confinement in the neatly clean walkway and the manifestly unstable condition of the installation, which consists of loose powder, produce a palpable tension; the sharp line separating the two areas, meanwhile, establishes an exterior within the interior. A similar aesthetic of dilapidation prevails in Cinthia Marcelle's installation À margem dos dias, which will soon open in São Paulo, but the creative approach she took at the former Hospital Matarazzo, which has stood empty for around twenty-five years, is the opposite of the one in Dust Never Sleeps: instead of adding material, the artist removed a quarter-century's worth of grime in a strip along the walls to produce a narrow zone of tidiness. In this instance, the visitors are restricted to the dusty corridor running down the suite of rooms.

For Temporário (Edelweiß-Zünder) (2014), the artist has filled the display case in the staircase with around 4,000 neatly stacked matchboxes. Given the soot-blackened installation in the Grafisches Kabinett, their presence feels densely charged with a latent menace. The work, which is part of the Temporário series (2011–), alludes to Cildo Mereiles's installation Fiat Lux (1979), which bristles with a similarly alarming energy. The alternating dark and light parts of the boxes, meanwhile, form the variously wider and narrower bands of a geometric pattern that bears the mark of industrial manufacturing, its rigid uniformity disrupted here and there by gestures of human action, recognizable in minor irregularities and faint traces of use on the dark striking surfaces. Like all pieces in the series, the work seems to suspend or call in question the display case's designated function: we cannot actually see into the space behind the glass pane, which has been repurposed as a flat visual medium.

A photograph on display in the staircase leading up to the Grafisches Kabinett is part of the diptych The Tempest (2014). It is a vaguely surreal scene: a dark-skinned woman stands in front of a rock wall in an otherwise empty white room. She holds a cleaning rag in one hand and wears white rubber boots; one foot is stuck in a bucket filled with a dark liquid, and her pant leg is visibly wet up to below the knee. The second part of the diptych, which appears on the invitation card for the exhibition, suggests a blunder (and, in an inversion of the sequence of events, anticipates it): the bucket has been knocked over and a dark wet spot marks the rock wall, while the perpetrator of this mishap is nowhere to be seen. As in a number of her photographs, Marcelle brings the theme of ostensible failure or misfortune into play.

For her artist's book, Cinthia Marcelle created a series of frottages, imprints of folded sheets, which is also titled The Tempest (2014). The choice of an analogue process of reproduction is interesting. As the support medium becomes a motif in its own right, the variations of the folding pattern relate a poetic narrative whose muted force derives from the simultaneous presence and absence of what lies underneath.

Ultimately, the dualism in the composition of Giorgione's Tempesta (ca. 1508) is a shared point of reference both in the works assembled in the exhibition Dust Never Sleeps and in the frottage series in the artist's book. The Renaissance painter's figures seem strangely isolated from the painted action around them. The gaze of the woman nursing her infant in the foreground crosses the threshold of the picture to address the beholder directly, emphasizing and simultaneously overcoming the division between the pictorial space and the outside reality of its perception. She seems to be within the painting and at once outside it, intimating that the viewers (like the visitors to Marcelle's exhibition) can bridge the gap between themselves and the work of art by power of their imagination. The passage between exterior and interior comes full circle, opening up another (spatial) dimension.

An artist's book featuring a series of frottages created specifically for this occasion, a reproduction of Giorgione's Tempesta, and an essay by Emílio Maciel will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Image: Los Flamencos, Con la Corrala Utopía, Cante tóxico nº III (La Fiera en Sevilla), 2012-2014

Press contact:
Katharina Schniebs Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34 presse@secession.at

Opening: Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 7 p.m., Welcome by Federal Minister Dr. Josef Ostermayer
Press conference: Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 10 a.m.

Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Closed on: May 1, November 1, December 25
Opening hours on December, 24: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.; January 1, 2014: 12 – 6 p.m.
Adults € 5,50
Groups (minimum 8 persons) per person € 4,50
Reduced rate (students, seniors) € 4,50
Groups reduced (minimum 8 persons) per person € 3,-

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