Visual Arts Platform – event archive
Wednesday 6 February 2008
Austrian Cultural Forum London
William Cobbing: Gradiva Project – The Wednesday Society
During Cobbing’s Gradiva Project (see current exhibitions) the Visual Arts Platform at the Austrian Cultural Forum London is pleased to host an evening of screenings and discussion at a special one-off ‘Wednesday Society’. Inspired by the Psychological Wednesday Society meetings held in Vienna by Freud’s publisher Hugo Heller, Cobbing will be joined by the Visual Arts Platform curator Adriana Marques, to discuss his practice and the influence of the mythical figure Gradiva on Freud’s work.
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Tuesday February 5 - Friday 4 April, 2008
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Gregor Graf
Gregor Graf’s exploration of urban architecture involves taking medium format images of mundane urban settings and painstakingly removing all text and symbolic references from the image, producing an anonymous and generic metropolis, yet evoking a sense of familiarity. In 2006 Graf was commissioned by the Visual Arts Platform to produce a new work during a residency in London. For his first UK solo show at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, Graf will exhibit new photographs of London along with other new works produced during a residency in Chicago, bringing together exploration of this two huge and complex urbanscapes.
For more information visit the artist’s website: www.gregorgraf.net/
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Wednesday 14 November 2007– Thursday 24 January 2008
Private View & Artist Talk: Tuesday 13 November, 6-9 pm
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Nikola Hansalik: I want them to buy my art, do I …
Presented by the Visual Arts Platform at the Austrian Cultural Forum
Seven telephones line the wall of an empty room, lit only by red neon lights. When lifted, the same voice speaks from each receiver and describes the future of Austrian artist Nikola Hansalik. In 2006 Hansalik travelled to New York, where the myth of success lines every street. Exploring the motivating forces behind the ever expanding art market, and questioning the mechanisms which attribute capital value to masterpieces, Hansalik set out to challenge her own future success as an artist. Over the course of a week, she asked a series of Manhattan fortune tellers to predict her future. The seven forecasts she collected, now heard through the seven receivers on the wall in her voice, seem at times uncannily identical, and at others, expectedly different. In asking for multiple predictions and presenting these in the same neon light so synonymous with New York, Hansalik removes the aura and veracity of a single prognosis, and reduces the intimate act of fortune telling into a banal cliche. ‘I want them to buy my art, do I…’ becomes an ironic self portrait, presenting personal details of an unconfirmed future.
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
5 September – 25 October 2007
Private View: 4 September, 6–9pm
Artist's talk: 5 September, 7pm
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Fabian Seiz - Talk to me Stranger
Two organic structures appear to morph into one another, joined by a makeshift umbilical cord. Constructed from a variety of cardboards, tape, and glue, this life size object which recalls both the intimacy of a womb and the uniform structure of a honeycomb labyrinth, appears neither stable nor fragile. Talk to me stranger, a new installation by Fabian Seiz, specially designed for the Austrian Cultural Forum London, invites you into these two anoymous spaces where sounds can be exchanged between one visitor and another. This experiment with communication, not sacred enough for a confessional, yet too claustraphobic for trivial conversation, becomes a fragmented metaphor for language itself. (more…)
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Opening Times
Monday–Friday
9am–5pm
9 May - 5 July 2007
Private View: 8 May, 6 - 9 pm
Artist talk with Dr. Andrea Phillips: 9 May, 7 pm
Austrian Cultural Forum London
mahony - strategy of action
28 Rutland Gate, London, SW7 1PQ, home of the Austrian Cultural Forum London, appears to exist somewhere between prominent cultural institution and grand residence, exposing and promoting Austrian culture by day, and hosting international artists by night. The three bedrooms upstairs have allowed singers to sleep and rehearse, conductors to review and perform, and writers to rest and rewrite.
However, when artist collective mahony arrived fresh from Vienna, they slowly began to undo the very workings of this organisation. As soon as computers and copiers switched to standby at the close of business each day, they literally unpacked, dismantled and shuffled the daily detritus that constitutes this 9–5 working environment. Removing glasses from kitchen cupboards, books from library shelves, and beds from bedrooms, mahony rearranged these materials into temporary interventions, lasting only long enough to be photographed in the midnight hours, before returning them precisely to their ordinary positions. As every corner of our public and professional lives becomes focused on efficiency and achievement, mahony have filled their nights at the Austrian Cultural Forum with absurd plans. Producing painstaking documentation of every objective detail, and developing laborious systems of moving and returning objects, their work becomes a rigorous, yet unoffical process. Appearing to have no purpose, these actions rebel against our IKEA generation, and bring life back to our treasured objects by allowing them out of the strict organisational systems we have created. These nocturnal processes, invisible to everyone but the four artists that are mahony, with the same beginning and end, have essentially usettled the dust and become a pure strategy of
action.
mahony was founded by Andreas Duscha, Stephan Kobatsch, Clemens Leuschner and Jenny Wolka in 2001, Vienna. The group’s fluid and conceptual work defies style or medium, utilising specific information from the site of each project to place their work on the threshold between fact and fiction, and to create new experiences of familiar surroundings.
The Visual Arts Platform is curated by Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques, who are based in Graz (Austria) and London respectively, and aims to explore local, regional and global contexts of contemporary art by generating new links between Austria and the UK through exhibitions, residencies and artist’s talks. (more…)
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Opening Times
Monday–Friday
9am–5pm
Wednesday 7 February 2007, 6.30 pm
Austrian Culural Forum London
Artist Talk: Markus Wilfling
Markus Wilfling will be in conversation with the curators of the Visual Art Platform, Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques.
Venue and Information
Austrian Culural Forum London
28 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PQ,
T 020 7225 7300, E culture@austria.org.uk or adrianagmarques@yahoo.co.uk.
Opening Times
Monday–Friday
9am–5pm
Wednesday 7 February – Saturday 7 April 2007
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Markus Wilfling: alice is where is alice
Presented by the Visual Arts Platform at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
Reflections refract reality. They reverse our vision while telling the truth; overturn our orientation while offering complete clarity. In the Austrian Cultural Forum’s new London gallery, two identical rooms stare at each other through an empty mirror frame which divides the space. To the right, one clock says ten to three. In the opposite room its hands chime backwards. On an old reading table, a book tells us about Alice in Wonderland.
On the opposite table, the backwards text proves too hard to read. By asking us to step between these two versions of reality, like Alice through the looking glass, artist Markus Wilfling confuses our most straightforward understanding of this ordinary living room. Is there a real and a reflection? An original and a copy? A right and a wrong? In doubling such ordinary objects with meticulous detail, Wilfling slows down our automatic perceptions, presenting minimal changes, yet completely inverting our world. (more…)
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Opening Times
Mon – Fri: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Saturday (February 10 – April 7): 12 pm – 6 pm
5 April - 4 May 2006
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Judith Fegerl - white light
Senses mediate all our experiences. Sight, heat, sound and touch determine our individual perceptions of every environment, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. These sensory mediations are the substance of Judith Fegerl’s work, drawing a fine line between art and scientific enquiry. Her physical explorations of the senses aim to produce a heightened awareness of the intervention that our senses play between virtual and material reality. Judith Fegerl will have been in residence at the Austrian Cultural Forum London to work on White Light, which brings together existing and new work. In this installation, red laser beams, light projections, and blinking LED’s, irritate our sight, as Fegerl transforms the automatic process of seeing into a definite experience, exposing light as the source of our vision. (more…)
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Opening Times
Mon – Fri: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Saturday (February 10 – April 7): 12 pm – 6 pm
27 January – 24 March 2006
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Constantin Luser - mind mapping
Constantin Luser’s work is characterised by a complex relationship between analog and digital. His drawings resemble computer generated images and trembling seismographic graphs, or some sort of abstract information output, yet signifying nothing in particular. Always meticulously drawn by hand onto the hard surface of any wall, Luser takes over these vertical planes and inscribes them with intimate lines, creating mindmaps which follow a flow of free associations. (more…)
Venue & Information
Austrian Cultural Forum London
London 28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
T: 020 7225 7300
E: culture@austria.org.uk
Opening Times
Mon – Fri: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Saturday (February 10 – April 7): 12 pm – 6 pm
Wednesday 23 Aprill, 2008, 7pm
Austrian Cultural Forum London
Artists Talk
Johannes Vogl in conversation with Tom Morton
Tom Morton, contributing editior of frieze magazine, and co-curator of the 2008 Busan Biennale, will be leading an artist’s talk with Vogl and the Visual Arts Platform curators Adriana Marques and Eva Martischnig.