Heimspiel 2021

In the genre of performance, the artist realizes a work in situ and at a specified time. Even if videographic or photographic documentation is made, the performance character in real time, which lives from the physical presence of the public, cannot be substituted by anything else. The media-immanent renunciation of saleable objects in favour of process-based realization was already inscribed in the development of the genre from its beginnings in the anthropological imprint of repetitive ritual execution to the improvised event structure of a happening and Action Painting. In the enactment of performances in an institutional setting, we are confronted with an artistic concept which is unknown to most of us but which creates very direct access to our emotional and physical here-and-now.

In the performances of Bella Angora and Ronja Svaneborg as part of “Heimspiel”, we will experience two world premieres in the assembly hall of Kunstraum Dornbirn, now become a black box. In the darkened room, the performance site is clearly defined by spotlights and is related to the other light sources in the exhibition and the works of the other artists.

“Come in! Come in! Entrez! Kom ind. Vstopite! Entrare! Jöjjön be! Entrar! Binnenkomen! Přijít! Hereinspaziert! Lassen Sie sich von den Wänden willkommen heißen.

Join us, please, for an evening of wonders where questions of control and disorientation are served through narratives told by unlikely sources.

Who gets to speak? Can a speaker be artist, exhibition space, and audience simultaneously?
What is said if a voice is granted to something that doesn’t seem to need one? We will have to wait and see!“

(Ronja Svaneborg on „I will be your space if you will be mine“)

Ronja Svaneborg, born in 1985 in Thy, Denmark, lives and works in Sibratsgfäll, Vorarlberg. Her work deals with found places and the question of our form of perception. What structures is perception based on? How can you control, disorient or redefine perception? What influence do content-related and historical markings of spaces have on our behaviour, and how can these be translated or transformed by shifting perception? How collective is individual experience and how important is the intimate in the collective memory?

Svaneborg’s conceptual approach treats what is not visible to the eye. The basic questions vary in abstract terms. Nevertheless, they are anchored in human reality and are visible to different degrees in social developments. The translation of memory into sound, the use of digitally generally accessible material for sound collages, or the addressing of stereotypical attributions are examples of overarching themes in Svaneborg’s artistic practice, which manifest itself as the media of installation, sound, performance and sculpture.

Bella Angora, born in 1968 in Bregenz, lives and works in Vienna. Her artistic repertoire is multi-media and cross-genre. Her confrontation with social developments and conditions takes place symptomatically and essentially by reference to herself: she uses her body as a substrate and projection surface. In her intense performances, she directs our gaze to where we as viewers recognize, identify, feel uncomfortable and perhaps also understand. Angora addresses the big questions of our time in touching, intimate and expressive actions.

In her new performance, “Quadratur des Kreises” (Squaring the Circle), she interacts with video sequences projected onto the floor. Thematically, the project treats the question of whether and how mankind can cope with current crises and challenges that are manifesting themselves on different levels. The term “squaring the circle” is generally used as a metaphor for an unsolvable task and refers here to current problems within our society.

Angora embarks on a search for possible solutions and repeatedly loses herself in absurdities. Geometric light patterns mutate into a navigation system in night mode, which repeatedly leads her astray. Self-ironic statements collide with pathetic emotional drama and flimsy social analyses. On her odyssey, Angora meets characters from Greek mythology and Hollywood blockbusters or rotates as a female Vitruvian figure in an earth graphic drawn by lines of light. The navigation instruction “Please turn around” turns into an absurd mantra on a path whose destination seems to have been lost.

Gilgi Guggenheim, born in 1973 in Haifa, Israel, lives and works in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The content of her work revolves around reduction and emptiness in all their manifestations and modes of interpretation. In 2016 she founded the “Museum of Emptiness” as a total work of art. “MoE is a curatorial platform that initiates projects in a wide variety of cultural sectors which address, contextualise and contain emptiness” (Guggenheim).

For nine years now, the reduction of painting has consistently manifested itself in her works in a single gesture: a broad brushstroke with a body-sized Zen brush. In her current work cycle, Guggenheim goes one step further in formal reduction by painting the line exclusively with water on empty spaces or façades, where it irretrievably disappears after a certain space of time. “They are moments of a present that are remembered as the smallest possible gesture of charging a place” (Guggenheim).

At Kunstraum Dornbirn, Guggenheim replaces water with pure light. She films this immaterial painting of the raw concrete floor in the darkened historical assembly hall until the last trace of light has completely disappeared. The video is then projected onto the floor for the duration of the exhibition and thus repeats in loop, and with an almost contemplative attitude and patience, the observation of appearing and fading.

Simon Kindle, born in 1983 in Vaduz, Principality of Liechtenstein, lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland. Kindle’s work arises from the experience of and with the reality of his life, viewed with a certain ironic self-distancing and humorous institutional criticism. In “Handschlag” he realizes a new work which addresses the conception of the exhibition “Heimspiel”. The outline of the hand and the arm length of Thomas Häusle are used by Kindle as the basis for creating an object using traditional stucco technique. Director of Kunstraum Dornbirn and thus curator of the international and cross-institutional exhibition “Heimspiel” in his museum, Häusle selected the ten participating artists on the basis of centrally collected applications. In “Handschlag”, this systemic selection process is also brought into focus for other participation formats. The “hand of the curator” decides on the visibility of artists and thus on their success, both financially and in terms of career (both that of the artist and the curator), worldwide. As a result of this individual and personal selection process, artists and institutions always exist in a charged relationship, which can be productive or destructive depending on the situation.

“Artificial Assistant No 2. The Baumeister Series 1.1-1.3”, 2021
Video, based on self-learning artificial intelligence, a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), 37:26 minutes in loop

„Ornament is Crime“, 2018
Video, fullHD, 12:29 minutes in loop

Claudia Larcher, born 1979 in Bregenz, lives and works in Vienna. Her video work “Artificial Assistant No 2” addresses the complex tension between man and machine, or more concretely, between artist and the artistic production of artificial intelligence (AI) in the age of the ubiquitous subversive control of perception and information through algorithms. The question of the meaning and evaluation of artistic genius has again been put up for discussion, while current developments in the attribution of meaning and the valuation of a work of art seem to be moving away from the established categories of the art market and art institutions, in some areas with considerable success. Larcher inputs pictures from her series “Baumeister” (2011-2021) into a Generative Adversarial Network, GAN for short. Processing this data, the program constructs its own images, the genesis of which becomes visible in the video.

Larcher’s diverse media works arise from a conceptual preoccupation with architecture, its potency, its uses and its function. They trace the historical markings of spaces, their perception in the respective zeitgeist and their narrative projects. The series “Baumeister” makes use of architecture magazines, but empties the pages of content, leaving only the documentary photographs of architectural elements and entire buildings. The resultant overlay is fit together in a collage of scenes, set in a wooden frame. These collaged compositions engender new, imbricated and dream-like scenarios of real space and thus tell a new story.

The second video work in the exhibition „Ornament is Crime“ documents what has already come to a standstill in the collages of the series: the scrolling and combining of the cut-out elements, the reorganization and increasing disorientation.

Ursula Palla, born in 1961 in Chur, Switzerland, lives and works in Zurich. Palla’s video installations, some of which are also spatially extensive, treat the construction of reality, which, particularly in the video “Whiteout 3”, results in an almost fictional yet real situation. The projection on the floor shifts the usual horizontal view of a snow-covered mountain into a bird’s eye view. Orientation is difficult and the landscape appears abstract and disconnected. The title of the work refers to the meteorological phenomenon of “whiteout”, which describes a certain brightness arising in polar regions or in high mountains covered with snow in combination with subdued sunlight. There is no longer any recognizable demarcation between earth and sky, no landscape elevation, no point of orientation. The video image begins to rotate until it dissolves in loss of contour.

Stoph Sauter, born in Dornbirn in 1963, lives and works there. As part of “Heimspiel” he shows his work “schonschön” on a screen on the façade of Kunstraum Dornbirn. This extends the exhibition into public space, reaching passers-by in direct, unplanned encounters.

Sauter’s primary medium is langauge, which he treats conceptually. The play on the words “schon” (already) and “schön” (beautiful) rests on the simple phonetic differentiation of the letter “o” by adding the two dots above it, making it “ö”. The meaning of the word alternates with the appearance and disappearance of the dots in the course of the video and thus changes constantly between the temporally connoted “already” and the evaluatively used “beautiful”.

Activation of the façade – art in public space
For a public unfamiliar with art, the vast majority of museums and exhibition spaces are framed by a threshold whose crossing represents a conscious decision in an effort to take part in the sphere of culture. Kunstraum Dornbirn has been dismantling this threshold for many years through its cooperation with the Inatura Natural History Museum, which has allowed us to successfully reach and inspire a public outside our usual scope of communication. In addition, the commitment to art in public space is an integral part of Kunstraum Dornbirn’s program. By positioning his work on the façade of the exhibition hall, Sauter allows it to include the surrounding municipal garden and passers-by in a subtle, humorous and finely pointed way.

Liddy Scheffknecht, born in 1980 in Dornbirn, lives and works in Vienna. In her work, the superimposition of time and space creates images and places almost incidentally, playing with perception and deception. She probes the boundaries of film, photography, installation and drawing. For her image inventions she works in the field of tension between light and shadow, movement and stasis, using the means of staged illusion, which she conjures up only to dissolve again in the next moment. Here the relationship between time and perception plays an essential role.

The video work “sun tube” shows a compressed tube of paint that appears to have leaked out in a glowing green spot. The patch of colour increasingly develops a life of its own, barely noticeable at first: slowly, it wanders across the table top. This takes place not because of digital manipulation but because of the inclusion of sunlight: the colour spot is a patch of sun that has been coloured by attaching a green film to the window. When a cloud moves in front of the sun, the spot slowly fades; when the cloud moves on, the spot becomes less diffuse. Sunlight and resulting reflection become a plastic material.

Scheffknecht’s film work “Raumfahrt” seems removed from earthly spatial parameters. In the dark, a narrow strip of light is visible which seems constantly to be undergoing transformation. After a few minutes, once the eyes have got used to the darkness, you can see that the narrow strip of light is scanning a room and that what becomes visible in fragments is changing constantly through the movement.

Veronika Schubert, born in 1981 in Vorarlberg, lives and works in Vienna. Her video work “Mindset” goes to the root of the zeitgeist of a generation, or of several generations at the same time, by focussing on the fact that the “digital natives”, familiar with the use of new media from the earliest age, are likewise confronted in the various media and social networks by fake news, photo-shopped ideal bodies and consumerist directives. This confrontation with idealized expectations demands a fundamental detachment and integration from each and every one of us, but is probably really achieved by only very few. In her work, Schubert creates a humorous, self-ironic and yet generally valid reflection of the immersive media influence. Her animated video “Mindset” is an image and sound collage of social media advertising. In a tunnel-like labyrinth, we float through rapidly changing constellations of images, incessantly accompanied by the cant of self-optimization.

“In my media bubble, the algorithm would very much like me to conform at last to the ideal. A woman around forty – she must be on the verge of a midlife crisis! Where is it then, the search for the meaning of life? Awareness at all costs, mindfulness come hell or high water, and the full dose of selfness!” (Veronika Schubert)

Cristina Witzig, born in 1971 in Santarém, Portugal, lives and works in Weinfelden, Switzerland. Her work deals with our handling and perception of memories. What effects do these have on our feelings in the Now and what do they call forth? What makes us remember?

In her video “Schattenspiel” (Shodow Theatre), Witzig presents a hand that, as the title suggests, performs a shadow play. She shows different objects by turning them in all directions. Someone seems to review them, examine them, perhaps to remember them. Like many fading memories, the objects in the shadow play can be experienced only as outlines, their concrete, detailed form – colour, feel, texture and density – remaining hidden to us.

Witzig’s handling of objects of memory raises the question of their substitutive function in the individual biography. Things are charged with meaning, recall certain phases of life or encounters, and are overwritten or erased with another content when passed on or forgotten. They are assigned a personal value that emancipates itself from the economic product and is essentially generated through emotion.