FLUSS IN ATHENS0

A Tribute to Contemporary Austrian Photography and Media Art

For over twenty years FLUSS has been presenting, researching and scrutinising the multifaceted meanings and relations of photography as an artistic medium, in recent years also increasingly incorporating the new media. Founded in 1989 as a non-profit association, FLUSS has by now almost sixty members, mostly photo- and media artists, photographers and cultural facilitators, whose objective is to encounter photography in a socially and artistically meaningful way.

In this exhibition we present five photographic series and five video works by contemporary Austrian artists, all of them members of FLUSS, as a cross section of artistic works in these fields. The selection rather aims at displaying the stylistic variety and diversity, than at focusing on a thematic concept. Some of the pieces have already been successfully presented in international exhibitions and festivals, others represent the new and not so widely known aspects of contemporary Austrian art production.

The short film Everything okay… by Magdalena Frey uses associatively arranged sequences to roam through a day in the life of two young women, in a very intimate way, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go asleep. While Frey uses jump cuts, narrative gaps and crosses the line quite often, Robert F. Hammerstiel composes constantly recurring activities, performed by four actors in a type of “father-mother-child role play” in an artificial environment, like serial music. In his video Alles in bester Ordnung IV (Everything is fine IV) types of pictorial and body language are used such as are common in television advertising, reproducing a family idyll. The repetitions which were filmed in reality, were repeatedly cut one after the other, thus trenchantly uncovering stereotyped patterns of behaviour. Also Good Boy by Gerald Zahn shows repetitive actions. But this time the camera is hidden and watches real passers-by stroking an already worn-out statue’s nose with surprising casualness and unexpected affection. The artist observes this warm emotional outburst in the context of anonymity and constraints of a big city. In this gently flowing video he uncovers one of the hidden emotional narratives of the public space. A found postcard and an old abandoned, former communist swimming pool in Bratislava were the impulses for Sabine Maier to re-evoke an absurd version of the Spartakiada. The guerilla dance performance in the abandoned Kúpele Central (the real name of the pool) starts as an associative and playful dealing with the images – synchronised movement, colourful costumes and the given space – but ends in a deep and heavy pictorial analysis of conformity and uniformity. Michael Mastrototaro’s Banska leads us into a world of dreams and representation of a shaky unstable reality shifting into a revealing projection. Here, too, a dance is performed, but this time as an imminent encounter between human and animal, never reaching an ultimate conclusion. The merry-go-round of inescapable sequence, both beautiful and horrible, starts anew with unchanged intensity, and no release comes.

Helmut and Johanna Kandl’s works have, despite their diversity in media and content, a common denominator: the traditional narrative. They focus on stories, rituals and wisdom from different cultures. Above all – as represented in the ongoing series File Cards – they maintain their sights on the experience of people from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In a completely different way Karin Mack is looking on the European Identity in a Global World. Her work expresses strangeness in a familiar setting. By the means of using fashion photographs where she cuts out the main figures, the artist creates a new type of scenery with an “open window”. Happenings from the most remote places of the world are entering our cosy homes. At that point strangeness may function as a mirror reflecting our own defects and our difficulties to cope with the new and the complex. Tokio Joinings by Wolfgang Müllner takes us into an even more alienated state, where memories of a real place merge, fade away or are amplified as time goes by. Nothing stays the same as it was. To demonstrate this confusion of feelings Müllner superimposes, inverts, multiplies and adds layers. The results of these manipulations are as unpredictable as the remembrances of the journeys the artist has done. On the contrary the Hidden Houses of Anna Zeilinger seem very clear, very calm. The houses which are so well hidden behind trees that they appear almost abstract, represent the other end of the arc of civilization: the loneliness of life in the vast emptiness between stars. This is the point where many people dedicate themselves to books, to theory. But this also can be dangerous, as Gerda Lampalzer proves in her work The Odessa Syndrome, a tounge-in-cheek paraphrase on the famous scene in Eisenstein’s movie The Battleship Potemkin: “Reading books about political economy, film and media theory, philosophy, perception theory and art makes me stumble over different stairs in and around my house. Is it the complicated text, is it the heavy weight that brings my legs to knot, my brain to knit and me to loose balance?”

Martin Breindl, curator of FLUSS