english - Eva Engelbert

Eva Engelbert
Portfolio
[email protected]
www.evaengelbert.com
Two Chairs, Three Forms (Agram–Vienna), 2016
Steel, car paint, blueback paper, 180 x 200 x 40 cm / 30 x 40 cm, Design: CH Studio
Ambassador’s Note, 2016
Videoloop, 34 sec.
for the exhibition “Coupé International Vol. Three – Eva Engelbert and Maja Marković”, 15. – 24.6.2016,
French Pavilion, Student Centre Zagreb, photos: Coupé International
For the exhibition Coupé International Vol. Three, Eva Engelbert and Maja Marković based their research around a conception of the French Pavilion as a space which showcased architectural and engineering achievements within a modernist form. Eva Engelbert was drawn to the economic history of the site, in particular the traces of the well-known Zagreb
furniture factory Bothe & Ehrmann, which also had a subsidiary in Vienna. Metal panels, lacquered in the newest palette
colors of the Peugeot car company, became presentation media for photographs of chairs, taken in museum depots in
Zagreb and Vienna. In this way, the artist infuses rare and forgotten examples of Bothe & Ehrmann furniture design with
the metallic glow of the car industry. The politics of displaying industrial achievements, typical of pavilions in the Zagrebacki zbor and Zagrebacki velesajam (Zagreb Fair) exhibitions, is inverted. Rather than highlighting a hyper-designed
representation of objects, the viewer is prompted to reflect on the surrounding historical, social and economic factors. From the exhibition text by Irena Borić
Chair – Wagner, Otto, design, 1912; Bothe & Ehrmann (?), production, Vienna, 1912; 95 × 44 × 52 cm; Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Depot
Still Ambassador´s Note
right: Posters, part of Two Chairs, Three Forms (Agram – Wien), Otto Wagner, Sessel, Entwurf 1912, Mak-Sammlung
Möbel und Holzarbeiten (c) MAK (above) and (c) Museum of Arts and Crafts Zagreb (below), Design: CH Studio
Chair – Designer unknown, Pilar, Martin, commission; Bothe & Ehrmann, production, Zagreb, 1904; 93 × 46 × 48 cm; Museum of Arts and Crafts Zagreb, Depot
Based on their common interest in site-specific exhibition spaces outside the white cube, and in the fluid relations between
people, objects and nature, the artists EVA ENGELBERT and KATRIN HORNEK have invited nine other artists to develop
works for a forest site in the Vienna Woods: Barbara Kapusta / Noële Ody, Ludwig Kittinger, Ralo Mayer, Klaus Schafler,
Susanne Schuda, Eva Seiler, Ekaterina Shapiro-­Obermair und Johanna Tinzl.
The site chosen for the exhibition – on the edge of Vienna’s sixteenth district, close to the Jubiläumswarte viewing tower
– is not only a popular local recreation area but also part of a global network. In 2005, the Vienna Woods were named a
UNESCO Biosphere Park. This is defined as a model region for research – a testing ground for economically, ecologically
and socially sustainable development. Particular emphasis is put on human activity as forming part of the biosphere.
Humans are also increasingly a determining factor in geology. Geology as a discipline defines the epochs of the Earth’s
history in terms of the layers laid down in the planet’s crust. According to biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and atmospheric
scientist Paul Crutzen – also a Nobel laureate in Chemistry – we have now entered the “Anthropocene,” a new epoch
shaped by human activity. We have irreversibly changed the Earth’s ecosystem, becoming a geological factor in our own
right. Humans and nature can thus be considered re-united, comprising a single entity.
The temporary exhibition MISSION W is conceived as an experimental apparatus capable of registering a series of mutual
interactions: between what is grown and what is made, between the verifiable and the unknown, between geo-engineering
and climate change. This is a mission into the forest, a mission to investigate complex political, social and historical interactions. It raises questions about our conceptual frameworks for nature and culture, and the boundary that lies between
the two. Further questions address the interactions that appear in these systems when very different materials are brought
together: the palms of the human hand, the tops of trees, a temporary clearance permit1, hemispheres of the brain and
computer mice.
The artists’ approaches are partly formal and partly conceptual. Some works affect their location, some melt or are eaten
by animals. Others make reference to objects or buildings at the site, including benches, information boards and the underground wartime command bunker locally known as the “Schirach Bunker.” As well as these historical references, there
is also a role here for previous experiments in hermetically sealed, self-sustaining ecosystems, including the American
“Biosphere 2” and the Soviet “BIOS-3”2.
MISSION W
curated by Eva Engelbert and Katrin Hornek
Biosphere Park Wienerwald, Jubiläumswarte, 1160 Vienna
4. – 31.10.2015
Participating artists: Eva Engelbert, Katrin Hornek, Barbara Kapusta /
Noële Ody, Ludwig Kittinger, Ralo Mayer, Klaus Schafler, Susanne Schuda,
Eva Seiler, Ekaterina Shapiro-­Obermair, Johanna Tinzl
more: http://www.mission-w.net
Design concept and photos: Studio DCW
The exhibition MISSION W is accompanied by an extensive program of events, with contributions from artists Marlene
Hausegger, Sabina Holzer / Jack Hauser and Emanuel Mauthe, scientists Herbert Hoi, Erwin Riess and Alexandra Wieshaider and theorists Heather Davis / Claudia Slanar and Raimar Stange.
1 — “Clearance” here refers to the use of the forest floor for non forestry-related purposes. To be allowed to use a section
of forest for MISSION W, a formal application had to be made for a clearance permit covering a total area of 26,306m2.
(Application KG 01405 Ottakring, #1991, submitted to Vienna Municipal Dept. 58.)
2 — In the Siberian BIOS-3 (1972 – 1984) a total of ten experiments took place within a habitation area of 315m2. In the
longest experiment, three crewmembers remained inside for 180 days. Biosphere 2 is a 1.3 hectare complex of buildings
constructed in Arizona in 1991. It also aimed to create a self-sustaining ecosystem, making use of our knowledge of
Biosphere 1 – the Earth. In the first experiment, eight participants lived inside the glass building for a total of two years
and twenty minutes.
1
2
1 - Ludwig Kittinger, Another Report on the
Construction of Situations # 4
2 - Klaus Schafler, COLD WARM Station
Wienerwald
3 - Barbara Kapusta / Noële Ody, Oh ! / d_or
4 - Susanne Schuda, Self Wood Hood. Ein
Totem
5 - Eva Seiler, Do You know the Way to San
Jose ?
6 - Ralo Mayer, Das Innenleben der Sonde
als Monument unermesslicher Suess-Effekte,
vergeblich isoliert
4
7
5
8
7 - Katrin Hornek, Wolke (Nephele)
8 - Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair, Geführt
9 - Johanna Tinzl, Positionsmeldung
3
6
9
Land der Hämmer (zukunftsreich), 2015
White cement, quartz sand, stone, 40 x 40 x 4 cm (tile size)
“The structural pathology of a building is a diagram diagram that records the influence of an entangled and potentially
infinite political/natural environment, registering year-on-year temperature changes, almost imperceptible fluctuations in
humidity and pollution, which are themselves indications of political transformations, patterns, and tendencies.”
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Notes on Fields and Forums, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, #062
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).
In an action oscillating between destruction, recycling and (theoretical) reactivation of the ruins of the Schirach Bunker,
Eva Engelbert speaks out. Land der Hämmer (zukunftsreich) is a sculptural artifact of her engagement with the Nazi past.
It also preserves a personal action. The impulse to smash the bunker’s concrete remnants is the spatial expression of a
“liberation” from a kind of architecture which the artist experiences as a political straitjacket and an instrument of power
and control. At the same time, by this process, she breaks the material down into its component parts, using them to
construct a fragile sculpture. The fragments are mixed with cement and sand, then cast into tiles. Layered one on top of
another, the tiles exhibit different levels of processing: some are completely sanded down, while intact chunks of concrete
protrude from others.
Things that do not disintegrate: the terrazzo floor in the kitchen of the grandmother’s post-war council house, built from the
rubble of the bombed-out city; “Mein Kampf” on the grandfather’s bookshelf, disguised in a crochet cover; quarries in the
Vienna Woods, which supply stone to a nearby cement works, the largest in Austria; detailed plans of the bunker in the
city and state archives – right up to the moment of capitulation, the Nazis were still adapting and improving it. All of these
things bear witness to the marriage of architecture and ideological insanity.
Hammer and chisel, breathing mask and ear protectors, stones and concrete, dust and crushed rock. The bunker is a
place in the forest where we can palpably feel the continued effect of the past on the present. It is a place where different
standpoints and possible ways of relating to (one’s own) history can become the subject of a shared discussion.
Saft (Succus Ex Horto Concluso), 2015
Eva Engelbert und Christian Hoffelner
Glas, steel, sirup, water, postcard, key, metal chain, variable dimensions
for the exhibition “Chasing Max Mustermann”, 04.09. – 17.09.2015, former Designhalle, Graz
The essence of things means an extract of their character: the substance that implies the whole. Or tastes like it, indeed.
“Cooking in the genres of art takes on a very special form, since in other disciplines such as poetry, painting and music
reality is not actually included, but instead images or associations with reality are produced.” (Peter Kubelka, Essen als
Kunstgattung, in François Burkhardt, Cibi e Riti – Essen und Ritual, Alessi SpA, Crusinallo, 1981, p. 20)
The content of the drinkable sculpture by Eva Engelbert and Christian Hoffelner is a cordial, syrup mixed with water.
Picking, cooking, distilling and preserving is created from the wealth of experience found in archaic cultural techniques.
The references sources of flowers and herbs were limited to a form of urban development typically found in Graz: the late
19th-century Gründerzeit­­block perimeter structures around the city centre, with large inner courtyards and in part planted
front gardens. The ritual of drinking in the exhibition space provides a direct reference to this public or semi-public space.
The cordial is a metaphor for diluting and liquefying a place and for alternative ways to directly approach the urban environment. Text: Eva Pichler, Translation: Kate Hewlett-Jones
Postcard, 1970ies, beach restaurant Shabla
Alle bösen Tiere beschwöre ich, 2015
Steel, cotton fabric (dyed with Sambucus ebulus), 3 x 2 m,
for the exhibition “вторник вечер,” 08.08.2015, Baba Vasa´s Cellar, Shabla
Since the 1990s, Bulgaria has undergone a radical course of privatization. Looking at the development of holiday resorts
like Slanchev Bryag on the Black Sea coast, we can understand the destructive violence of unchecked speculation. This
speculation is what allows an upper limit of 30,000 beds to be increased five or even tenfold – depending on what estimate
you accept – with knock-on effects for the resources of the local environment and for urban quality of life.
Shabla, a popular holiday resort in the socialist period, has still mostly been spared this accelerated development. Because of a comparative lack of infrastructure, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, its tourism has mostly consisted of individual
visitors. The changeover to the capitalist system has not yet been spatially inscribed in the form of architecture. These
circumstances are the starting point for this work, in which the structures of the place are investigated, abstracted and
transposed into the present day in the form of a sculpture. The skeleton of a sun shade is refitted with a dyed fabric. The
sun shade once stood on the terrace of a beach restaurant, while the dye plant Sambucus ebulus thrives on the waste
ground between the derelict bungalows. It has an unpleasant smell and berries of an intense violet color. In folk medicine
it was regarded as a treatment for snakebites.
On Support, 2015
Eva Engelbert and Katharina Schniebs (scientist)
(painted) wood, plastic cord, screws, wing nuts, HD-Videos, variable dimensions,
monitor 1: 1/3 09:55 min, 2/3 10:26 min / monitor 2: 3/3 18:02 min / projection: 01:25 min Loop
for the exhibition “Invisible Violence”, 14.02. – 10.04.2015, Salzburger Kunstverein
In 2014, the question of how Europe faces a constantly growing number of refugees arose with particular urgency: There
were a rising number of geographical hot spots that are hardly geopolitically delineated as well as wars frequently leading
to humanitarian catastrophes. European nations are continually called upon to act, but yet actions of the relevant authorities often amount to nothing more than delays and dismissals in view of agreements to devide the refugees among individual countries according to particular conditions. Refugee policy becomes a cynical game of numbers and thus precisely
negates the criteria that should be its central focus: the individual´s need for protection. This applies particularly in Austria,
where the refugee policy is particularly restrictive.
Though directives are implemented narrowly on an institutional level, commitment within civil society is diverse: The
starting point of the work “On Support” is the interest in the initiatives of people living in Austria who themselves support
refugees. Eva Engelbert and Katharina Schniebs met these people and asked them: What is possible? What can this
support look like? How is the practice of solidarity and humanity articulated here? What can one oppose openly emerging
institutional violence? And because taking someone in also means accepting that person: How does one manifest civil
courage in a country where integration is rarely a reciprocal process?
Several videos are presented in a “supportive” display that is both a sculpture and a spatial analogy to the people who
appear in the videos.
Photos: Andrew Phelps, (c) Salzburger Kunstverein
Cjanâl, 2014
HD-Video, 15:51 min
for the exhibition “Lichtblick”, 18.10 – 16.11.2014, Paviljon NOB, Tržič
On both a verbal and a visual level, there is a blurring of present and future, documentation and fiction. An
abandoned railway tunnel in the Canale Valley (Italy) becomes a contemporary oracle site.
Modell Populus, 2015
Poplar-plywood, Ø 200 cm, 50 x 28 cm
for the exhibition “Import Export”, 31.05. – 12.07.2015,
Nordbahnhofgelände, Vienna
more: www.skulpturinstitut.at
New Universe, 2014
Pigment prints, each 20 × 29,7 cm, wall paint, adhesive letters
Material: Wien Museum, Stadt Wien (MA 21)
for the exhibition “Pipe Dream”, 29.01. – 14.03.2015, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna
enf ernst niklaus fausch architekten, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Sauerbruch Hutton Architekten, Podrecca & Podreka, Riegler
Riewe Architekten ZT Ges.m.b.H, Dietrich Untertrifaller Architekten, Gasparin & Meier Architekten, Pool Architektur ZT
GmbH, ARGE frauen bauen urban
The new universe was a popular amusement park located on the site of today´s Nordwestbahnhof freight station between
1843 and 1870. This place of entertainment was also a political one: During the Viennese October Revolution worker
assemblies were held there, at times resulting in bloody conflicts. Lithographs from the 1840ies in the collection of the
Wien Museum show the park, its attractions and visitors strolling under the trees. On the basis of these reproduced prints
and different (language) patterns, which she found used in both the submissions of an architectural competition for the
redesign of the abandoned freight station terrain as well as in political rhetoric, Eva Engelbert constructs collaged images
that oscillate between nostalgia and science fiction. The cut-out shapes, inspired by the blocks drawn in the plans, reveal
hidden universes and make linguistic representation and visual presence collide.
Plein air, 2014
Eva Engelbert and Katrin Hornek
Acrylic wall painting, variable dimensions
executed by Maria Peters
for the exhibition of the same name at the Neue Galerie, Tiroler Künstlerschaft, Innsbruck, 04.09. – 11.10.2014,
exhibition views: Neue Galerie, Tiroler Künstlerschaft, Photos: West. Fotostudio
from the exhibition text: In a dialogic exhibition, two artists communicate via autonomous works. Open air painting meets
conceptual art, the exterior is transposed to the interior, the interior to the exterior. As a structure of dialogue, mural painting in the gallery space allows for leaps in time between historical artistic forms and contemporary thought. The clouds
also make direct reference to the Baroque state rooms of Innsbruck’s Hofburg, situated above the exhibition space, in
particular the ceiling fresco in the “Giants’ Hall.”
o.T. (Wien/Innsbruck), 2014
Baryta prints, each 57.6 × 70 cm
Two warehouses, similar in their architecture and location, both situated in abandoned railway goods depots, each serves
to display the words “Trans” and “Form.” In Vienna, letters of an existing sign were painted over with white paint. In Innsbruck, black cardboard lettering was applied to the wall of the building.
The golden room, 2014
HD-Video, 4:27 min
Global Positioning System, 2014
Pigment print, 44,5 × 60,2 cm
aus dem Text:
“(...) Particulary striking is the large standing figure to the left on the corner by the door. There you can see a young man
with shoulder-length hair, a laced doublet and a tight two-coloured hose called “Beinlinge”. He´s wearing pointed shoes
and “Trippen”, or wooden under-shoes to protect him from the mud. He originally held a banderole in his hands with his
name on it. Here the artist immortalised himself. But since his hands unfortunately went missing in the course of the
centuries, we still don´t now today who the artist and builder was. Now please move on to the next room and press the
green button.”
left: external wall of the exhibition space
right and below: details
REPLICA
Replica, 2014
Adhesive foil, c. 2.50 × 1.50 m
for the exhibition “A Loss of Control,” 22.05.2014, Super, Vienna
Beginning from the imitation marble on the rear wall, the reproduction of the valuable material, known as “white gold,”
was brought into the exhibition space itself. With the same proportions as the original architecture, the foil covers the wall
and adjusts to it. Making use of an old craft technique, different materials were inlayed to create a flat surface. Here, letters made from differently colored marble foil were added as an inlay, creating the word “Replica.” On the one hand, the
inscription refers to an actual replica: the imitation of an original. But in rhetoric, a “replica” is also an answer, a kind of
counter-speech, a reaction, an antithesis. A counter-speech with appearance but no substance, a “Potemkin village” tactic.
Addendum: the typeface used was “Replica,” by Norm, a Zürich design studio. It quotes elements from traditional Swiss
linear fonts, like Helvetica, but at the same time, the font breaks with typographic conventions in its use of a crude raster
and cropped diagonals.
The works presented in the exhibition were created in parallel, bringing together things apparently distant from each other.
This creates a resemblance to theatrical backdrops, an appearance which the pieces then investigate.
The photographs Tokyo Blue and Congo Blue depict blue-colored foil stretched out in the middle of the site of Vienna’s
Nordbahnhof. The Nordbahnhof was one of the most important railway stations in Habsburg Austria; today it is a place
where waste ground is being transformed into a new city district. Elements of the picture appear through a filter: shimmering through the foil are the contours of the new buildings which constantly encroach onto the undeveloped spaces.
Nothing is directly known about the origin of the names “Tokyo Blue” and “Congo Blue,” which are part of a popular filter
system for lighting design, photography and architecture. They are just “great effect colors,” to be assigned, without
context, to a location. Which blue would the picture’s location have, were it to be turned into a color? And if the light was
artificially altered, what photographic image of the site would result? The construction is reminiscent of a photo studio
backdrop. But placed here, in a gap between buildings, it becomes the main subject of the photo, a projection screen for
departure and distance.
The subjects of Eva Engelbert´s “zoological” field research are animal sculptures in concrete, stone and bronze, commissioned by the Viennese municipal authorities in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a public art scheme. The sculptures,
dubbed “exotic” at the time, were placed in many municipal buildings and city housing projects, mingled together under
titles like “Four Seasons” or “Children’s Game.” Mostly anachronistic – not in dialogue with contemporary art of the time
– they simultaneously thematize and domesticate the fantasy of “distance.” Scattered throughout the city, often hidden behind elevators or other architectural additions, they survive silently in time. Christa Vogelmayer’s elephant grows together
with the surrounding prickly hedge, while Alfred Hrdlicka’s playing lions sink slowly into the ground. A sealion by sculptor
Othmar Jarmen was recently moved, when a housing project in Vienna’s Darnautgasse could not be renovated and had
to be demolished. The empty plinth in front of the dilapidated building forms a monument to disappearance, without itself
disappearing. Engelbert locates the animal sculptures and collects them. The result is the photo series Versammlung (Assembly): a cartography, both historical and contemporary, of props which evoke both home and the “exotic.”
The piece called Zugvogel (Migratory Bird) shows a plinth with the remains of Alois Heidel’s fountain-sculpture of geese,
completed in 1958-59. The geese, later stolen, once stood together with two other geese in the Johann-Kaps-Hof, an
urban development in Vienna’s 20th district. Since the theft, the bronze baseplate with one intact goose and several severed geese feet has been stored in the depot of MUSA, the contemporary art collection of the city of Vienna. The depot’s
function as an archive is made clear, but a question is also raised: whether it makes sense to limit the accessibility of art
objects, protecting them from vandalism but also taking away their function as art in public space.
Recreated on the exact dimensions of the staircase of the municipal building, a model-like staircase serves as a presentation surface for typical house plants with tropical origins. The plants of the central installation Musa tropicana* are on
loan from staff offices in Vienna’s municipal departments 18 (for city planning and urban development) and 21 (for district
planning and land use), which are located in the floors above the exhibition space. Here, the white cube, the civil service,
and thickets of bureaucracy encounter one other.
* “Musa” is the scientific term for a banana; ornamental banana plants are often sold as “Musa tropicana.
In the field
MUSA Museum Startgalerie Artothek
04. – 28.02.2014
left: Exhibition view,
Musa tropicana, Congo Blue and Tokyo Blue
Musa tropicana, 2014
Wood painted, Plants,
~ 75 × 110 × 140 cm
right:
Versammlung, 2013, C-Print, 26 × 34,6 cm
Zugvogel, 2014, Concrete Pedestal and Bronze Sculpture by A.Heidel
Tokyo Blue, 2013, analog C-Print, 125 × 100 cm
Musa tropicana, 2014, side view
left: Congo Blue, 2013, analog C-Print, 125 × 100 cm
Zugvogel, 2014, Rest of a sculpture by the sculptor Alois Heidel on concrete pedestal
Bronze, 18 × 20,5 cm, 1958/59
Concrete, 150 × 26 × 28,5 cm, 2014
Versammlung, 2013
34 C-Prints, felt
each 26 × 34,6 cm
Welcome to European Union –
Grenzverhandlungen am Rande Europas
An exhibition project by
Eva Engelbert, Alena Pfoser (scientist) & members of the Photoclub Narva
Galerie IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna
21.03 – 03.05.2013
Additional events:
09.04.2013
Borders and (Im)mobility – Film screening
Clemens von Wedemeyer: “Otjesd / Leaving” (2005)
Volxtheater Karawane: “publiXtheatrecaravan.mov” (2002)
Isa Rosenberger: “Nový Most” (2008)
Aurelia Mihai: “...si cel moldovean” / “... and the Moldavian one” (2008)
25.04.2013
Refugees and the EU border regime: (Il)legal situations, demands, strategies
a discussion with Ronald Frühwirt (jurist, journal Juridikum), Alexandra König (political scientist) und Judith Ruderstaller
(jurist), chair Paula Pfoser (editor MALMOE).
plus: screening of selected video-material, recorded during the first weeks of the Refugee Protestcamp Vienna (autonomous, temporary media collective together with the Refugee Camp Wien)
The exhibition “Welcome to European Union” deals with the local negotiations of Europe’s new external border between
Estonia and Russia. The title is borrowed from souvenirs – magnets and shot glasses that were sold at a festival in the
Estonian border town of Narva. “Welcome to European Union” indicates a promise – the access to the larger geographical and political space of ‘Europe’ after the Eastern enlargement. A small grammatical error – a missing article – however
signals a crack in the greeting and is used to ask questions: What does Europe mean locally? Who has access – who is
welcome?
The border towns of Narva (Estonia) and Ivangorod (Russia) that are connected by a bridge and used to form a common
social space in the past are a microcosm for a critical examination of the border. Starting from the local level the exhibition
uses different media – video, photography, a border map – to examine the social phenomenon of a ‘border’. The works
examine situations and sites in public space where the border becomes visible and the multiple ways how borderlanders
deal with the new regulations. The works aim at questioning the “false simplicity” (Balibar 2002) that is suggested by the
imagination of the border as a line. They aim to portray a dynamic and contested border space with multiple connections,
inclusions as well as exclusions. Although there are power asymmetries in the making of a border, it nevertheless presents
itself as a lived space – with both limitations and opportunities for its inhabitants.
The project is the result of a collaboration between artist Eva Engelbert, sociologist Alena Pfoser and members of the
Photoclub Narva (Sergei Barankov, Valery Boltushin, Oksana Kipjatkova, Irina Kivimäe, Igor Kostyuk, Anton Lukinskij,
Elena Shtshekotihina, Olga Shustrova, Jaanus Siim, Tatjana Upeniek and Irina Vasilieva).
Exhibition views Galerie IG Bildende Kunst
Common Places (Photoclub Narva), 2012
Pigment Prints, 42 × 29,7 cm
a: Valery Boltushin photographs Adelina Sokolova
b: Jaanus Siim photographs Valery Boltushin
c: Elena Shtshekotihina photographs Irina Irina Kivimäe
d: Irina Kivimäe photographs Elena Shtshekotihina
e: Olga Shustrova photographs her friend Natasha
f: Irina Vasilieva photographs Aleksandr Vasiliev
g: Oksana Kipjatkova photographs her daughter
h: Anton Lukinski photographs Igor Kostyuk
i: Tatjana Upeniek photographs the couple Ivan und Ksenija
j: Sergei Barankov photographs Jaanus Siim
k: Valery Boltushin photographs Marianna Boltushina
Common Places is a photographic (self) examination of the border space, which focuses on the everyday. It is a group
work by the Photoclub Narva, a collective of professional and amateur photographers. The members of the Photoclub
were asked to portray each other or their friends and relatives in front of personally meaningful sites in the public space.
The portraits and texts accompanying them present familiar sites that serve as places for staging one’s local and personal
identity and also as sites of reflection over the changing life at the border. The images indicate a space full of political and
economic changes: the break-down of the communist regime, the nationalisation and Europeanisation of the borderland,
crystallised for example in the newly erected fences and barriers, the closed factories and the new shopping centers.
How to build a bridge, 2012
HD-Video, 5 min. 8 sec.
Fjodor Schansin is a model maker in the Estonian border town of Narva who has been working on a small-scale model
of Old Narva, the town before its destruction in WWII, for many years. Fjodor builds churches, houses and towers out of
cardboard, paper and glue with excellent craftsmanship. For the video the model maker was asked to build a bridge. “How
to build a bridge” is a whimsical instruction manual: drawing upon the tradition of DIY- videos (‘how to’ videos) Fjodor’s
speedy hands show us how to establish connections within a couple of minutes.
Winter, 2013
HD-Video, 9 min. 50 sec.
The video shows views to the other side of the border filmed along the Narova river, a cold and snowy winter landscape.
Four people tell about their lives on the border and their ways of negotiating it: a woman who was separated from her
husband by the border; a smuggler who makes her living from cross-border petty trade; a young man from Ivangorod and
a cross-border worker who commutes between Narva and Ivangorod everyday. The frozen landscape is transformed by
their stories; the meaning of the other side changes with the narrator and appears as symbol of a painful loss, a source of
income or a welcome access to Europe. The stories are based on interview excerpts with inhabitants conducted between
October 2011 and January 2012.
Narova, 2012
HD-Video, 7 min., 3-Chanel-Installation
Narova shows a boat trip on the border river: two cameras film the shores (Ivangorod/ Russia on the right side, Narva/
Estonia on the left) along the Narova river till it opens out into the Baltic Sea. The trip is accompanied by the hobby accordionist Mart Pung from Narva. Being asked to play a sailor song, Mart plays the international song of longing “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”. Narova plays with the desire to travel and make borders habitable. It is based on the tension
between the visual banality of the EU external border and the knowledge about its hard and emotional charged character.
Grenzkarte, 2013
C-Print 75 × 124,7 cm , wood, plexiglas, fabric, collection of texts, various dimensions
The border map presents an alternative way of mapping a border: rather than showing the border as a line, it illustrates
the history of connections and divisions in the Russian-Estonian borderland and shows the diversity and multilocality of
the border in the geographical limited space between Narva and Ivangorod. The border map shows selected sites in both
towns in which the border manifests itself locally and is negotiated by its inhabitants: the cemetery where people from both
sides have been buried, the Krenholm factory where people used to work together, the new sites of trade and consumption which are nourished by the growing price differences.
Zucker und Benzin, 2013
Sugar, wood, metal, receipts, various dimensions
Image above: Sketch
The work deals with circulations of daily economy at a border region and plays with imaginations of a life on the “other
side”. Because gas is cheaper in Russia and sugar supposedly sweeter than in Estonia many of Narva´s inhabitants cross
the border regularly to shop these goods. A jerry can, bought in the hypermarket “Prisma” (Narva), serves as a casting
mould for an object out of Russian sugar, carried across the border in form of a 10 kg bag.
Carsid, 2012
Eva Engelbert und Paula Pfoser
HD-Video
05 min. 14 sec. , Loop
for the exhibition “Ville en abime”, 31.08. – 09.09.2012, Palais des Expositions, Hotel Charleroi
Carsid is a Belgian steel producing company that has a production site in the industrial zone of Charleroi. Due to its lacking rentability the site was closed in 2008 and its 800 employees lost their jobs. The company’s estate is now a black
wasteland that consists of coal, slag, concrete ruins and hills covered with plants. In the background big chimneys and
further back, the city.
The tableau-video shows traces of life on this abandoned site – remote-controlled cross-country vehicles that make their
ways around and across built structures. Slowly one car enters from the right side, followed by two other cars and their
owners. They drive, stand, jump across, get stuck and finally leave the image – until the video loop starts again.
The wasteland shown in Carsid paradigmatically stands for post-industrial areas that have been left over after the capital
moved away to other production sites. The traces of past production are visible in the urban space and function as symbols of present-day decline. However, people continue to inhabit these places; they use, shape and restructure their city
and invest it with meaning. While the big machines stand still, small ones drive around and explore the territory.
Stills
left: Exhibition view Palais des Expositions, Charleroi
The two young artists Eva Engelbert and Katrin Hornek were invited to conceive a group exhibition based on their own
­production methods and social relations in the art field. This approach dispenses with the usual functional division between curators and artists, nor is it primarily a matter of selecting artworks addressing a particular topic; instead, it represents an attempt to create an aesthetic and spatial illustration of existing and evolving working contexts and shared ways
of thinking.
The work and livelihood of young artists today, particularly those who do not produce according to the whims of the market,
are determined to a great extent by grants, study fellowships and residency programs. At least two phenomena result from
the associated ever-changing settings, social environments and personal contacts: the first is that most artists accumulate
a rapidly growing network of international artist friends and acquaintances whose significance often extends beyond the
respective local scene. And, second, there is the paradox of artists engaging with their changing locations and the specific
issues there and developing works whose relevance then seems questionable in other places. Eva Engelbert and Katrin
Hornek integrate both of these points into their exhibition concept. The invited artists are part of a network of producers
who have in most cases gotten to know each other in places where none of them is at home, channeled through funding
programs and the like. For the self-organized gathering of artists in their exhibition, the curating artists focus on questions
such as: What happens en route between a real place, the locus created by a work of art and the exhibition space? Is
the art space fictional? What kind of space is created when we transport site-specificity somewhere else? Does the local
context become nothing but a backdrop, thereby ending up depoliticized? Is contemporary art as mobile as its artists?
Of interest here is the question of the site-specificity of artistic work and the conditions that might make its translation in
space and time possible. While discussions of site-specificity have been strongly linked since the 1960s in certain conceptual ­currents with a critical reflection on the gallery space and the work of art as a commodity, this issue is in part a different
one today. Given the above-mentioned structures, which almost demand that artistic practice makes reference to its location, site-specificity loses some of its aura as critique, and the self-localization of the artist requires some contemplation of
the problems of the persistence and further development of site-based work under these conditions.
A sense of place
curated by Eva Engelbert und Katrin Hornek
Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt
18.10. – 30.11.2012
Participating artists: Eva Engelbert, Ann Guillaume, Karin Hasselberg, Katrin Hornek,
Johanna Tinzl / Stefan Flunger, Kay Walkowiak, Hannes Zebedin, Josef Zenzmaier
Additional event: 14.11.2012
Reading Anna Kim “Invasionen des Privaten”
The contributions of the participating artists to “A Sense of Place” generate in the exhibition a convergence of artistic arguments on the cited problems of the local associations and “transportability” of certain methods. Johanna Tinzl and Stefan
Flunger (A) add to their video The Fence is European, which they shot on the Moroccan-Spanish border with commentary
by a Spain taxi driver, a ­voice-over spoken by a taxi driver from Carinthia, thus creating a link to border and immigration
policies on the frontiers of, and within, Europe. Karin Hasselberg (S) presents the sculptural current state of her research
on the possibility of an any site specific object, which would function in any exhibition venue, along with a video from her
Hole Series that documents the physical intervention of the artist in the soil of various exhibition locations. The video work
Nomads by Kay Walkowiak (A) shows eight Indian street scene sequences in which a white cube, which can be read as
a pedestal, a minimalist work of art or a quote of modernist architecture, is dragged along the ground behind a bicycle
rickshaw. Ann Guillaume (F) compares and contrasts in her video Ancestral Voices the different ways in which history and
culture are presented in tourism and scholarship, using the example of ancient Greece, and also exhibits on a shipping
pallet the Kunstraum Lakeside curtain, taken down and folded, ready for transport.
Unusual for a group exhibition of young and conceptually oriented art is the inclusion of the 79-year-old Salzburg sculptor
Josef Zenzmaier (A), whose larger-than-life bronze statue of Paracelsus has been installed temporarily outside the exhibition room. As an example of a traditional concept of sculpture, Zenzmaier’s Paracelsus fits into the project context due to
its special history as a work commissioned for a specific place (the University of Salzburg), which however then forfeited
that location, so to speak, in the course of a decades-long production process and differences between the artist and his
clients. In direct proximity to Zenzmaier’s sculpture Hannes Zebedin (A) creates a work for the advertising pillar in front
of the exhibition space that deals with movement-strategies of the Carinthian partisans and their tactics between secrecy
and political propaganda during the Nazi era.
Eva Engelbert and Katrin Hornek (A) were inspired by an internet game on global communication to create an artistic
“bracket”: in an act of overblown globalism, their Earth Sandwich traps the ­globe between two halves of a bread roll, one
each at kunstraum lakeside and at Chatham Islands Museum, located at the opposite end of the globe in the South Pacific.
The museum is represented at kunstraum lakeside by way of information materials and photographs of the roll half, while
the Kunstraum is present at the Chatham Islands Museum in the guise of its program booklets and a photo of the other
half of the roll. In bringing together the different works described above in ­“A Sense of Place,” it is hoped that a discussion
will be set off on the meaning of location in contemporary art.
Text: Christian Kravagna, Hedwig Saxenhuber
1 - Josef Zenzmaier, Paracelsus, bronze-sculpture, 1985-2010
2 - Karin Hasselberg, Considering the Any Site Specific Potential of a Transparent Object, glass, pedestal, 2011-2012
3 - Johanna Tinzl / Stefan Flunger, La valla es europeo (Der Zaun ist europäisch)., HD-Video, 2011
4 - Ann Guillaume, Ancestral Voices – Reaktualisierung, DV-Video, sculpture, C-Print, paletts with inlay,
curtain, 2011/2012
5 - Kay Walkowiak, Nomads, HD-Video, 2011
6 - Hannes Zebedin, Dort, wo die Krähen sitzen bleiben., black and white copies (leaflets of the Carinthian partisans
1938-1945), decoy bird, leaves, 2012
Exhibition view, Kunstraum Lakeside (A)
(Institutional) Earth Sandwich, 2012
Eva Engelbert and Katrin Hornek
2 C-Prints 36,7 × 50 cm, 2 roll halfs,
Infomaterial Chatham Islands Museum (NZ), Kunstraum Lakeside (A)
Exhibition view, Chatham Islands Museum (NZ)
Il est interdit d´interdire, 2011
Wood, spraypaint, 175 x 220 cm
for the exhibition “Le choix de Paris”, 10. – 26.10.2011, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris
“Il est interdit d ́interdire” (It´s forbidden to forbid) – a slogan by the Situationist International, often seen in the Parisian
streets during the protest movement of may´68 – is sprayed on a wooden fence, blocking a door in the exhibtion room.
Then the message is fragmented and becomes unreadable. Only the work ́s titel on a sticker next to the installation decodes the abstract mural. “Il est interdit d ́interdire” is a reflexion on the actuality of former ideals, the codes of movements
and the layers of history.
Tomorrow
Galerie 5020, Salzburg
03.03.2011 – 02.04.2011
“A small pamphlet, titled “Not Utopia Yet”, had been left on each of our beds. It lowered expectations for the visitor program and detailed the joining process. After the visitor period ended, the community took a vote: You could be accepted,
rejected, or asked to visit for another three weeks.” (J.C. Hallman, In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better
Paradise, New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 2010)
Not Utopia Yet, 2011, Pen on paper, 90 × 128cm
right: Exhibition views
Konstruktionsversuche, 2011, Props dolly of the Salzburger Festspiele, different materials, various dimensions
If, 2011, Pine plywood, 90 × 128 cm
Paradies, 2011, Pigment print, 65,5 × 45 cm
Prestige, 2011, Pigment print, 65,5 × 45 cm
I was here, 2011, C-Print, 80 × 100 cm
o.T., 2011, C-Print, 44 × 60 cm
Robinsons, 2010, analog C-Print, 105 × 130 cm
right: WOU (Wildlife Observation Unit), 2010, analog C-Print, 94 × 79 cm
Tomorrow, 2011/2012
HD-Video
16 min. 20 sec., Loop
An undefined collective organizes itself in an undefined site. They draw plans, build, spray, discuss, exercise, and send
messages – they prepare themselves for tomorrow. For action? Insurrection? The camera’s path through their space is
looped, but the peoples’ positions change – they present deviation within repetition. When is tomorrow?