calendario eventi  :: 

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17/9/2008

Four exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

Klaus Weber

In his first major solo show in Austria the Berlin-based artist Klaus Weber is introducing work from the last few years, including works specially conceived for the exhibition, in which he lends the main space of the Secession the character of a living organism. Light, sound and smell play a supporting role and sensually interweave the various objects with the space. Exemplary for this is the new work SONNENORGEL, which serves as the "central organ". For this, Klaus Weber has had a heliostat installed and a number of glass panels replaced on the roof of the Secession to send unfiltered sunlight into the space and, directed by a pile of mirrors, to light the other artworks like spots. In this way he not only invisibly brings the outdoors into the space but also deconstructs the white cube of the Secession and lays the architectural structure open.

Klaus Weber conceives works across various media and spatial units which are frequently based on complex technological interconnections and intricately organised production processes. However, by deliberately manipulating everyday structures, the tracing of deviations and the exploration of the impossible they undermine the metaphorical and actual power of a functionalist rationality.

In doing this Klaus Weber repeatedly resorts to images of nature, and explores the sustainable potential of the not-tobe- tamed in a thoroughly humorous, anarchic manner. This characterises the fungi, the pavement mushrooms, that are capable of breaking through an asphalt surface(UNFOLDING CUL-DE-SAC) as much as the fountain filled with homeopathic LSD (PUBLIC FOUNTAIN LSD HALL). Klaus Weber addresses our social imagination through the combination of cultivated, political and public forces with uncontrollably and wildly expanding rhizome-like phenomena. What is generally considered to have rebellious or dubious connotations, i.e. an autonomy that eludes permanent control by the state and society, appears constructive. As a result, the artist subversively reinterprets the loss of control which is negatively perceived in the informed Western world with its marked inclination towards repression.

This is the background before which the strategic moment inscribed in the work of Klaus Weber by the integration of the sensual, the atmospheric, the absurd and the organic is revealed. The aim is to expand awareness and, as instruments for escape, as catalysts and filters to add dynamic to the work's setting, to temporarily lift the dominant cultural and social consensus.


The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by Alex Farquharson and Clemens Krümmel, among others (German/English).


Klaus Weber, born 1967 in Sigmaringen, lives and works in Berlin.

SOLO SHOWS (Selection): 2008 Klaus Weber, Secession, Vienna; 2007 Shape of the Ape, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; The Big Giving, Hayward Gallery, London; 2006 The Big Giving (small group), Herald St Gallery, London; 2005 Allee der Schlaflosigkeit, Kunstverein in Hamburg; Der Geist ist ein Wasserfall, MAMA Showroom, Rotterdam; 2004 sick fox , Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Unfolding Cul de Sac, Cubitt Gallery, London.

GROUP SHOWS (Selection): 2008 der blinde Fleck, NGBK, Berlin; Manifesta 7, Trentino; Kabul 3000 (love among the cabbages), Gallery Zero..., Milan; 2007 design by accident, croy nielsen Galerie, Berlin; The Object is the Mirror, Layr Wuestenhagen Contemporary, Vienna; memorial to the Iraq War, Institute of Contemporary Art, London; syntropia, NGBK, Berlin; 2006 FASTER! BIGGER! BETTER!, ZKM-Karlsruhe; You'll Never Know: Drawing and Random Interference, Hayward Gallery, London; After Cage. Künstlerinterventionen, Nationaal Jenevermuseum, Hasselt; 2005 Ecstasy. In and About Altered States, MOCA, Los Angeles; Not a drop but the Fall, Künstlerhaus Bremen, The Imaginary Number, Kunstwerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Communism, Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

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Tilo Schulz

In his show entitled Stage Diver, Tilo Schulz presents an installation conceived specifically for the Secession. Three interconnected rooms built from precious mahogany panels extend through the gallery's exhibition halls, creating a space that offers visitors a variety of subtle experiences. The space begins as a stage, then transforms into a small enclosed gallery where the artist's drawings are on view, and finally leads into a long catwalk that extends to the end of the exhibition hall, where a casually arranged stack of Thonet chairs creates the impression of a long-abandoned place.

The exhibition can be perceived only by walking through the installation from one end to the other, actively putting it to use. In this way, this autonomously changing “space within space” becomes a “transition space” and space of action for visitors that seeks to evoke reminiscences and associations and inspire reflection. The installation clings to the existing architecture of the exhibition halls, takes it up by following its shapes, reproduces and imitates them, and yet remains selfcontained and autonomous. The beam structure, partly visible from outside the installation, associates temporary architectures such as theatrical stage designs. The aesthetic perfection of the interior and its lavish mahogany surfaces form a glaring contrast with the provisional character exuded by the outside.

Tilo Schulz's work is located at the interfaces between art and handicrafts, architecture, and design; between high and popular culture. Questions of presentation and representation, of individual perception and the social or political instrumentalization of art are recurrent central issues in his works and exhibitions.

The artist, who has also frequently worked as a curator, devotes as much attention to the mise-en-scène of the visitor's course through the exhibition, of visual axes and spatial sequences, as to the visitors themselves, who are taken into account from the earliest planning stages. Schulz sometimes invites them to become agents in his exhibitions, a process the artist calls “activation.” One characteristic feature of Schulz's oeuvre is his close engagement of the formal language of modernism. His interest in the (historical) debate between the politically instrumentalized art of the former totalitarian systems of the Eastern Bloc and the supposedly free art of the West — a debate his works often critique — is rooted in the artist's biography; he was born in the former East Germany in 1972.

His works fuse these allegedly contrary and rival formal languages, arguing against the unambiguous legibility and immutability of visual signs and aesthetic forms.


The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Peio Aguirre and Stephanie Smith.


Tilo Schulz, born 1972 in Leipzig, lives and works in Berlin.

SOLO SHOWS (Selection): 2008 STAGE DIVER, Secession, Vienna; BACKDRAFT, Dogenhaus Galerie (with Dimitrios Antonitsis), Leipzig; Schwarzbuch des Formalismus, Steinle Contemporary, Munich; 2007 Sweet Dreams, Magazin4, Bregenzer Kunstverein; Back Stage (In Memory of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), Jan Winkelmann, Berlin; FORMSCHÖN, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig; 2003 rebel inside (displaying Friedrich Kiesler), Kiesler- Display, q21, Vienna; 2001 The Return of Display, D.A.E., San Sebastian; wie macht man eine Gruppenausstellung, ohne jemanden einzuladen, Dogenhaus Galerie, Leipzig.

GROUP SHOWS (Selection): 2008 The Leipzig Phenomenon, Mucsarnok- Kunsthalle, Budapest; 2007 „What a great space you have…(L.A.)“, Claremont Gallery, Los Angeles; Overtake, Glucksman Gallery, Cork; 2006 ASPEN 11 (Part 1), Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt; POSTER, Hydra School Project, Hydra; Made in Leipzig, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg; 2005 50 Jahre documenta, Fridericianum, Kassel; o.T. (city IV), Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig; 2004 Infra thin Projects, Book Works, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Repeat Performance, Artist Space, New York; 2002 deutschemalereizweitausenddrei, Frankfurter Kunstverein; 1998 Manifesta2, Luxembourg; Junge Szene, Secession, Vienna.

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Ralo Mayer

What forms of action and cultural practices are postulated via world models and miniature universes, for example in science fiction literature? To what extent do such models reflect the social organisation and the channelling of creativity and desire in their construction and interpretation? Ralo Mayer has been pursuing the issue in the research series HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS (in collaboration with Philipp Haupt and others). In the form of scripts, performances, comic strips and scenarios in the space he has developed polyrhythmic narrative structures. Interweaving fictitious and documentary material these investigate various model worlds and the designs for space and time to be found inscribed in them.

For his exhibition at the Secession Ralo Mayer focuses on Biosphere 2, a greenhouse constructed between 1987 and 1991 in Arizona as a self-contained ecosystem in which eight scientists spent two years living in a world in miniature and experienced the visionary experiment's failure. The vast privately financed crystal palace, which once served as a scientific test model for colonies in outer space, is a space-age ruin today. Ralo Mayer understands the BIOSPHERE 2 both as a pivot combining the atmosphere of change in the 1960s and '70s and the associated search for alternative life-styles with current global changes, as well as being a burlesque allegory of the total control of all facets of life.

Ralo Mayer's already long preoccupation with the topic, his understanding of his work and his working method is marked by an approach that involves performative research, a processorientated artistic production of knowledge. So he approaches the BIOSPHERE 2 as a translator of the historical science fiction novel THE NINTH BIOSPHERIAN; this imaginary book only takes form through the conveying in different fragmentary situationrelated scenarios. At the Secession he shows an ensemble of interconnecting (experimental) arrangements: audio and text excerpts on clipboards, a self-contained ecosystem in a glass ball, a slow motion set reminiscent of the Chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge, as well as the "paratactical ruins of a documentary on Biosphere 2".

The individual elements share the mechanisms of a dynamic interaction between crystalline and structured organisations and organic processes, featuring them in the context of post-Fordist production while challenging the possibilities and shifts resulting from the two-dimensional projection of multidimensional systems.

Further motives addressed continually in Ralo Mayer's work are the questioning of his own position as narrator, the authorship and the interweave of fiction and reality. This becomes explicit in the exhibition's presentation as part of the magazine MULTIPLEX FICTION, a metamorphic collaborative publication. The ensuing video and audio realisation for the Secession have been completed in cooperation with the performer Krõõt Juurak and the musician Andreas Berger.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing an interview by Eva Maria Stadler and a second text by Ralo Mayer (German/English).

Websites Ralo Mayer:
http://www.manoafreeuniversity.org/howtodothingswithworlds/
http://www.was-ist-multiplex.info
http://www.daegseingcny.net


Ralo Mayer, born 1976 in Eisenstadt, currently lives and works in Vienna.

SOLO SHOWS (Selection): 2008 Das Muster der Schatten des Spaceframe der Biosphere 2..., Secession, Vienna; Ein Blick durch Millionen Tropfen, die sich durch Kondensation..., Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck; 2006 Settings 2007-2009, Galerie 5020, Salzburg; HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS, 1, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck.

GROUP SHOWS (Selection): 2007 There is no border, border, no border,..., Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Fluchtwege und Sackgassen, Festival der Regionen, Upper Austria (with Philipp Haupt); Der gesichtslose Blick, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna and Sibiu (with Philipp Haupt); 2006 No Space Is Innocent, Steirischer Herbst, Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with Philipp Haupt); Not Sheep: New Urban Enclosures and Commons, Artspeak, Vancouver; 2005 Utopie: Freiheit, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Moving..On..., Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin; W...WirWissen, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna.

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Sašo Sedlaček

As the third and final project in the series Footnotes, Slovenian artist Sašo Sedlaček is presenting a new site-specific project in the Secession's display case. There are always niches in city space, in services, laws or even the outer space that people have forgotten or have never thought about. These niches are exactly what Sašo Sedlaček looks for. His primary interest seems to be things that people overlook and the ways they can be made useful once again. He sends home-made beggar robots to shopping malls where human begging is prohibited and enchants people with his creature (BEGGAR 0.0, 2006); he creates and advertises a recycling laboratory kit for paper brick production (NO LEGO, 2005) and demonstrates its possible tactical use by building a wall in front of a shopping mall with bricks made of direct advertising flyers (JUST DO IT!, 2003).

One might say that Sedlaček's works result from a subversive recycling of scientific, legal or technological facts, employing DIY (do-it-yourself) and collaborative methods. Considering discarded space and European geopolitics, his interest has recently turned toward certain historically rich and rather ambivalent national, territorial and cultural relations in Central Europe and toward personal strategies of rethinking, revitalizing or overwriting these.

As he polemically wrote:
“Probably every European nation carries a territory in its memory, which sometime in the past extended well beyond its present-day borders. From a nationalistic point of view, present territorial maps seem like amputees. However, with new integrations in today's post-Cold War world order, it seems that many territorial maps are being redrawn again. This is actually an opportunity for reestablishment of some historical economic and cultural environments that were once successful, like the Austro -Hungarian Empire — the major historical and cultural reference for every Central European nation. Austria is showing us by way of its recent economic and cultural expansion into the territories that were only a few years ago still behind the iron curtain, that such concepts are not only a thing of the past. Today, there is no need anymore to create new countries or officially move the borders in Europe; these can be moved simply from one apartment to another. Territory is not only an abstract notion. At a personal level, it is above all a piece of real estate: an individual's territory is his house or apartment.”

Accordingly, Sedlaček's project is a promotion of the real estate trade. Similarly to his earlier projects, he draws attention to hidden places and strategies that can be key to future developments in the region. At the same time, he finds a way to promote his own art — is it a singular artistic move, or can this gesture be seen as representing a core strategy that leads to mutual benefit in this ambiguous situation?

Ö-U Immobilien employs a sort of urban mimicry when appearing as an advertisement board in the display case. Addressing directly the capital of Austria, this final project in the series FOOTNOTES once again articulates critical comments on the predicaments of life in the city, focusing on individual aspects of urban and regional development in a personal and non-spectacular way — in small print, so to speak.

(Hajnalka Somogyi)

* Quotation and more info: http://www.sasosedlacek.com


SAŠO SEDAČEK, born 1974 in Ljubljana, lives and works in Ljubljana.

SOLO SHOWS (Selection): 2008 Ö-U Immobilien, Secession, Vienna; Lost Territories, Mala galerija, Ljubljana; 2007 Infocalypse Now, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana; Rent-a-robot, P74 Gallery, Ljubljana; Urban-Woodenware wending machine, Mikova hiša, Ribnica; Recycling strategies, lju cosinus brx gallery, Brussels; 2006 Beggar (robot for materially deprived), Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana; 2005 Copy China!, Likovni Salon, Celje; 2004 Loop, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana; 2003 Just do it!, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana; 2001 Biotope Condition, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana.

GROUP SHOWS (Selection): 2007 Land(e)scape, Künstlerhaus Graz; Suitcase Illuminated #5 Paris stop, Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Paris; Nit/Thread, Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts, Slovenj Gradec; Suitcase Illuminated #5 On Parallel Economy, P74 Gallery, Ljubljana; 2006 Device Art, Rx Gallery, San Francisco; Young Visual Artist Award, Priština; ISCP Open studio, New York; II.Ogaki Biennale, Ogaki; Cultural Typhoon, Tokyo; 2005 Pretty Dirty, Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana; Break 2.3, Grad Kodeljevo, Ljubljana; 2004 Loop Pavilion, Un desigh di carta, Feltre; 2003 Friendly fire, Forum Stadtpark, Graz.


HAJNALKA SOMOGYI is an art historian and independent curator. Between April 2001 and June 2006, she ran the international exhibition program of the exhibition space Trafo Gallery of Trafo–House of Contemporary Arts. She is the founder of DINAMO Workshop and of Impex–Contemporary Art Provider, two independent art initiatives in Budapest. In 2006, she was a curator inresidence at Art in General in New York City, in the framework of the residency program of CEC Artslink. Currently, she is enrolled in the Curatorial Studies Program at Bard College, NY.

Image: Klaus Weber

Press conference: Thursday, September 18, 2008, 11.30 am
Opening: Thursday, September 18, 2008, 7 pm

Wiener Secession
Friedrichstrasse 12 - Wien

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