SHIFT: IN THE MIRROR OF UNCERTAINTY
15 September – 11 November 2006
www.galeriegritainsam.at
After moving to a new storefront space in Vienna, Grita Insam Gallery
presented an exhibition that could be taken as a paradigm for the physical
and visual movements occurring in art. ‘Shift’ transcended the dialectics
between the visual representation of the real and the real as a physical yet
temporary phenomenon. Architectural interference in natural environments as
well as visual interventions in the dynamics of interiors led to an
interplay between reality and fiction.
The works varied between photographic installations and objects such as
Czech artist Krištof Kintera’s moving coconut or ski stick put into a
wiggling computer mouse. Július Koller, the figurehead of Slovak conceptual
art, presented a variety of photographic intervention pieces from the 1960s
onwards, including a series in which the artist holds signs announcing the
distance to his birthplace. The Austrian duo Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber
explored the dynamic of modernist architecture and how wide-angle lens
photography distorts perception of monumental buildings. In their
trans-national analysis, Bitter and Weber compared the views of
institutional buildings such as the UN headquarters in New York or the
Brasilia Supreme Court. Rita McBride currently works with monumental
architectural gestures, yet her photographic interventions were animated
proposals which turned the Vienna Secession into the roof of a skyscraper or
outlined a silo grid structure entitled Mae West in a public place in
Munich. As a trailer, the project was turned into a video changing between
futuristic architectural intervention and people dancing in stereotypical
Bavarian folk dresses. Marijke van Warmerdam’s photo intervention consisted
of speech bubbles inserted into a brook, evoking ice blocks as well as comic
book dialogues. Finally, Ingo Giezendanner’s cardboard and drawing
installation presented an urban structural interface in which drawings turn
into an urban-jungle video animation, creating a shift from reality to
fiction and vice versa.
Walter Seidl