Unrest of Form | Imagining the Political Subject

Opening | Friday, 10.05.2013, 7.00 p.m., garden of the Secession, Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Welcome address | András Pálffy, President of Secession
Stefanie Carp, Performing Arts Director Wiener Festwochen,
Andrea B. Braidt, Vice-Rector  for Art | Research, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Christian Strasser, Director MuseumsQuartier Vienna
Introduction | Karl Baratta, Stefanie Carp, Matthias Pees, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Georg Schöllhammer, curators of the exhibition,
Johannes Porsch, display
Performances | Carola Dertnig, Tacheles Speech
Dora García, Der Künstler ohne Kunstwerke. Eine Führung durch nichts, Boris Ondreička Noemas, speech from and by Ferdinand Schmatz, Meine her geleerten Samen und Beeren, speech by Judith Nika Pfeifer LOOP with Benedikta Manzano

All venues are accessible at the time of opening!

Curators | Karl Baratta, Stefanie Carp, Matthias Pees, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Georg Schöllhammer

Display | Johannes Porsch

Artists at the xhibit in the Academy | Tim Crouch, Barbara Ehnes, Mapa Teatro, Rabih Mroué, Marina Naprushkina, Milo Rau, Akira Takayama

Artists in the exhibition parcours | Thomas Arzt, Volkan Aslan, Neïl Beloufa, Luo Bing, Brad Butler, Banu Cennetoğlu, Keti Chukhrov, Antonio Cosentino, Tim Crouch, Cordula Daus, Burak Delier, Elmas Deniz, Carola Dertnig, J. C. Duenkel, Jimmie Durham, Barbara Ehnes, Gustav Ernst, Tim Etchells, Antonio Fian, Franzobel, İnci Furni, Dora García, Thomas Glavinic, Dmitri Gutov, Wang Haian, Wen Hui, Hannah Hurtzig, Elfriede Jelinek, Anna Jermolaewa, Schorsch Kamerun, Hassan Khan, Julius Koller, Chris Kondek, KwieKulik, Mapa Teatro, Zhang Mengqi, Karen Mirza, Rabih Mroué, Jia Nannan, Marina Naprushkina, Henrik Olesen, Boris Ondreička, Ontroerend Goed, Yasemin Özcan, Mustafa Erdem Özler, İz Öztat, Ewald Palmetshofer, Judith Nika Pfeifer, Shu Qiao, Nuno Ramos, Milo Rau, Ad Reinhardt, David Riff, Kathrin Röggla, Pedro Romero, Ferdinand Schmatz, Franz Schuh, Tino Sehgal, János Sugár, Akira Takayama, Vladimir Tatlin, Miguel Ventura, Tris Vonna-Michell, Jeronimo Voss, Wu Wenguang, Tanja Widmann, Dilek Winchester, Li Xinmin, Zou Xueping, Shiri Zinn and others

Since new protest movements have been cropping up worldwide, often quite unforeseen and bursting with inexhaustible energy, many people in the artistic-cultural sphere who feel solidarity with these movements are faced with a number of explosive questions: can contemporary art advance the resistance against fraudulent economic structures if it has itself a definite share in them? Or have the true potentials of art – i.e. the difficult, the nonconformist – already been liquidated behind the façades of its spaces still conceived as free? Must not the project of a political aesthetics transcending all activism suitable for media exploitation be considered aborted and suppressed? In our view, this historic aporia now needs to primed for artistic imaginations of a political subject embracing novel forms and formats.

Wiener Festwochen 2013 will dedicate the exhibition Unrest of Form to these forms and formats. For this group show, all Secession rooms and adjacent exhibition areas at both the Academy of Fine Arts and the MuseumsQuartier will be transformed into a parcours – a walking tour that explores the agora of the future at the interface between visual and performing arts. For the duration of the exhibition, this parcours will be enlivened on a temporary basis by artistic interventions, lectures, concerts and performances as well as by ten political speeches given by Austrian authors, who will address the present or future political situation through a fictitious identity – a language experiment – to thematise what is wrong in the public discourse or missing from it, and to try to pinpoint the blind spot of politics. These speeches – each of approx. 15 min. duration – will be given by the authors and/or performers in different exhibition venues and repeated on certain days.

In the freiraum quartier21 at MuseumsQuartier there will not only be permanent installations by various artist but also temporary performances within the context of the exhibition walking tour. The performers will be the English artist Tim Etchells, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué and the Belgian group Ontroerend Goed, just to name a few. The Turkish artists’ collective Group P consisting of Antonio Cosentino, Burak Delier, Elmas Deniz, Ínci Furni, Mustafa Erdem Ozler and others will reside at the Freiraum and use it as starting point for their artistic interventions in the public space of the MuseumsQuartiers.

Unrest of Form is part of the project „Politics of Form. The re-discovery of the political subject, carried out by Wiener Festwochen, Württembergischem Kunstverein Stuttgart and Bergen Assembly, supported by the European Commission.

Parcours-Pass

The Parcours-Pass is valid on 2 selectable days. It is available from 27 April 2013 at the Festival box-offices and from 11 May 2013 at the box-office of the Secession.

Further venues:

Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Telefon (+43-1) 587 53 07
Fax (+43-1) 587 53 07-34
office@secession.at
www.secession.at

Museumsquartier (freiraum quartier 21)
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
Telefon (+43-1) 523 58 81
office@mqw.at
www.mqw.at

Further information