A Bestiary | Adrien Tirtiaux

Opening: 20 May 2008, 7 pm
Adrien Tirtiaux
in converstation with Andreas Spiegl, Vice-Rector for Teaching and Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Tirtiaux’s performative interventions are detached mises-en-scene that incorporate places and situations in which they are shown. Responding to visual conditions through quiet alterations, his practice balances fantasy and playfulness against the disclosure of mechanisms that fabricate images and environments. In Auprès de mon arbre (2007) a few paint coats and a mirror construction transform the base of an elevator protruding into a gallery with a window open onto a dark courtyard, into a tree and screen filled with sunlight that give the impression of a park. For It’s A Long Way To The Sea (2006), resulted from a performance touching upon absurdity, he turned a cabin inhabited during a residency in Groningen into a white cube adapted to float for days on a characteristic Dutch canal. For this exhibition the artist has concealed the display conventions used to exhibit art into a compendium of beasts, an ironic manoeuvre whose pictorial rules follow the primary forms of these elements rationally, comparing them to animals of similar scales. To escape assimilation and overturn the logic of incorporation a TV monitor, for instance, becomes a monkey and in the game of pairing displays to artworks, illusion refashions “neutral” tools, showing how absent-minded childishness helps art to escape legitimising the institution. (DB)