xposit / two twelve. The Alumni Exhibition Series at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

MEETING POINT | Office of the Rector, M 5
GREETER | Eva Blimlinger
Introduction to the work of Veronika Merklein: Carola Dertnig

Office of the Vice-Rector Teaching | Promotion of Earlystage Artists / Researchers
GREETER | Karin Riegler
Introduction to the work of Jenni Tischer: Dorit Margreiter

Office of the Vice-Rector for Art | Research
GREETER | Andrea B. Braidt
Introduction to the work of e park und eppark: Hans Scheirl
PERFORMANCE | e park und eppark

Veronika Merklein , born in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. She graduated in 2012 with main focus Performative Art. Merklein lives and works in Vienna.

Through repetition and self-consciousness of the act, and interpreted in regard to its intended environment, the pose takes the form of composed and deliberate performance.

The photographic works Pose 1 - Marina Abramovic and Pose 2 - Veronika with a handkerchief are allegories on the classic disciplines of painting and sculpture, at the same time participating in the current discussion on the possibilities for exhibition of performance art works. The moving object and the unmoving subject recognize themselves in the immobility inherent in my performative works. The works take the form of two freestanding life-size displays along with a joint portrait Pose 3 - artist with Rector and a guinea pig , and were designed specifically for the office of Eva Blimlinger.

e park and eppark completed MFA at Goldsmiths (2010) and mag. art at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2012) and since keep on trying to build a network of associations while pondering the condition of what it means to be an auteur at the interface of the inscrutables in which it parasites.

Their work has been included in group exhibitions at the Shoreditch Town Hall (2010), Event gallery, London (2010), the woodmill studio (2011) in London and Kino-SOIRÉE VIDEO, CORNER COLLEGE, Zürich (2012).

The collaborative assemblage practice also includes the on going performance based project with Phil Root as 666 6  which presented at the festival and as a opening event at the wising art center (2011, 2012). They live and work in London and Vienna.

For xposit, e park presents an installation of old and new works in the context of an ongoing collaboration with eppark, who left vast amount of archive material in 2010 to e which since has opened up the unknown journey of a manifestation of the brain map - an open ended collaborative assemblage to e park's practice.

The exhibited works are taken from the past paintings (2005-7, Vienna) and on going drawings (2004-, Vienna, London). A partial adaptation of earlier projects done at the academy, lady cunt lalala (2004-2008), from the archive materials consisting performances and paintings will be the basic material for the installation and new performance which will be presented on the opening day.

At the periphery of this "never ending" project echoes a narrative cacophony resulted from the exploitation of writings of Barthes - for his writings speaks about judgment and value, about expectation and disappointment, about comedy and tragedy, and obsession and pathos - a heartbreaking love which situated on the borderline between the work and the life, between the system and the subject of the system in the most straightforward way. These narrations are paraphrased in the space as a point where the agony of realising that guarding against the stereotypical discourse which lies in the past practice only bears the determination of the disguised violence to itself as it violates its self otherness in itself hence that hidden violence in the intended protection makes value of the space as a pure functional passageway for operations of substitution, not some singular and irreplaceable existence, that moves between future and its death which happened at the moment of living, between reality and fiction, a mere function or phantom witnessing its own spectacle by denying its existence as a spectacle.

The narrations are presumably replying to this agony of being which destined to be kept in the work as its been erased without subject knowing it in the movement of questioning, torn between the languages of expressive and critical in order to know, if knowing means anything here, as the shifting territory of selfhood explores creative endeavour in the uncertain time of shifting ideologies and power, trapped in the system.

Jenni Tischer , born in Heidelberg, Germany, studied Fine Arts with Dorit Margreiter at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and graduated in 2012. Tischer lives and works in Berlin.

www.galeriekrobath.at/kuenstlerinnen/Jenni_Tischer

All of Jenni Tischers works, objects and framework sculptures share the capacity to generate a sensory and semantic flicker - an oscillation between image and language, between concept and meaning(s) - when looked at. In that process, she predominantly applies the situational principle of détournement, meaning misappropriation, removal and reinstallation of structures of meaning, for instance, in theories, texts and images, or also of materials. Accordingly, text fragments become artistic material and hence objects. The original meaning of texts is then no longer present, but the text Tischer compiles and weaves is meaning and requires an open, non-linear reading. When this is applied to the experience of art at this exhibition, it connotes just such an open and non-linear way of reading the objects and sculptures. In conclusion, we can say that the artist always touches on the threshold of our perception in her works and awakens narrative associations informally via her material, inviting further narration. It is possibly a question of describing something without mentioning it. Or, to put it in the literary terms of Gertrude Stein from her novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor: "Build away with neither as a guess. There is no further guess. Everybody knows, and they need not say."

The object, Ohne Titel (Untitled, 2012), consists of four square elements, producing a spatial structure in the form of a cross. One of the framed panels was not covered with vertical threads and instead it hanging in it a black and white, woven text-mesh made of strips of paper and fastened with four threads. The abstract composition of text fragments is strongly reminiscent of visual poetry. Jenni Tischer obtained these fragments from a cut out she made of various theoretical texts. The texts deal critically with the role of an artist in the world of work. A two-sided cut-out has resulted with visual blanks, which can be individually invested by readers or viewers respectively with meaning, as per reception theory. This cut-out with the title, She stepped out (2012), is included in the exhibition and can, therefore, be distributed as a loose-leaf work in paper.

Text: Cynthia Krell