Images from the Museum's Collection
06/11/10 till 27/03/11
Images from the Museum's Collection
How individual are our perceptions of ourselves and our own bodies? Our appearance is influenced by social norms, shaped into certain poses, labelled
by fashion brands, controlled and determined by our everyday environment. The works on display in this exhibition do not depict the body as an expression of authentic individuality, but as a plane for the projection of social inscriptions.
The exhibition presents about 45 contemporary works from the museum‘s own collection, which deal with the construction of personality depending on the body as means of expression. This has nothing to do with an emphatic notion of individuality in the sense of a self-determined awareness of one‘s own body. The works selected focus on the way in which the body is formed by exterior influences.
Youth cultures define themselves through certain looks and poses, which they express with their bodies. Youths and their typical attitudes as representatives of pop culture are the motif of Nicole Schatt’s drawings
and the large-format paintings created by the artist duo Muntean/Rosenblum. Ulrike Lienbacher explores gender-typical poses in her
photographs. The artist plays with the recognition of a specific pose and investigates what makes a certain pose female or male. Anja Ronacher uses the body as material and freezes body postures during movements. In this way the body is turned into a sculpture. mehr
In her series “Körperkonfigurationen” (”Body Configurations”), VALIE EXPORT
describes the principles of the body’s adjustment to its environment as “adaption“, “insertion“ and “addition”. She uses her body to form
architectural settings of urban spaces and presents her body as manipulable
material. Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch also explore the relationship between body and space. In their film stills they show the time flow of an action, at
the end of which the actor‘s body reaches the adjacent room through an opening in the wall that is created during the performance. Christoph Rütiman’s video work turns the spectators’ attention to the relationship between the perception of the beholder and the apparatus of the camera. In his video we can watch the track of a camera mounted to a rail system and learn how the bodily process of seeing is regulated by technology.
The exhibition also shows works by Stephan Balkenhol, Manfred Erjautz, G.R.A.M., Manfred Grübl, Maria Hahnenkamp, Caroline Heider, Birgit Jürgenssen, Werner Reiterer, Markus Schinwald, Borjana Ventzislavova, Heimo Zobernig and others.