Opening: Monday, 5. May @ 7:00pm
Opening speech: Ruth Horak
This year’s focal point deals with the one of the existential aspects or our lives: Love.
In three exhibitions Love I – Searching, Love II – Being, and Love III – Collapsing spans the range around a difficult, delicate and emotional topic.
Love I – Searching gives homage to the beating of the heart, to the state of animated suspension at the beginning of falling in love and approaches this complex condition of the heart from 9 artistic positions. Longing – searching – approaching – accepting in connection with: Fragility, uncertainty, magic, symbiosis, idealism, self identification, euphoria, feeling fluctuations… – are content wise key words of the visual approaches and arguments.
Armin Bardel shows, in his series Tatorte, places as contemporary witness of first meetings, first sexual adventures and connects these with text excerpts from a love struck diary achieving an autobiographical jogging of the memory.
In the work Selbstliebe Aimée Blaskovic cites Erich Fromm and his thesis of positive self-love results in the ability to be able to love others. She examines the balancing act between: self to the partner – self to the society – expectations of your own and demands of others – self-love and narcissism.
Nina Dick’s work hello. are you there? is engaged with the recognition of proximity via new ways of digital communication (Skype) and captures the fragility in spatial distance of a beginning attraction as a slice of reality from one evening.
The videos All my Life and Excess Baggage by Oriana Fox deal with self-discovery and the search for the absolute love. Media, cliché, fashionable influences, pieces of advice from parents and friends become entwined in an ironical way with ones own autobiography and fantasy.
Ivan & Laura refer in their work Twins to the standardization of reproduction as the principle of (bio)capital. Sexuality, gender roles and their functions are likewise analyzed like the defining of oneself through others, which fluctuate emotionally between a tender and an aggressive attraction and allows no clear attributes.
Sissa Micheli makes reference in her installation I love you, I hate you to the film „La Jetée “by Chris Marker and translates that back and forth oscillation between: love – hate, victim – suspect, bringing together the search for luck and fulfillment versus the impossible, in a media reflexive confrontation of photography and film/video.
Marzena Skubatzs finely layered lyrical photographs transform the question about what is love?, in landscapes and portraits to an individual mental state as image. The picture pairs merge into an emotional symbiosis of longing, expectations, and fearfulness.
Marion Üdema investigates in her series FreundeFinden the partner search, as well as the erotic self-presentation of those searching internet forums seeking contact and uncovers media ubiquitous body poses and picture conventions. The attempt to create ones own ideal picture stands contrary to visual paradigms of an era and its society.