21 July - 30 September 2007

CAPITAL GLAMOUR

Andreas Fogarasi, Bernhard Kahrmann, David Maljkovic, Pernille Kapper Williams

The group show »Capital Glamour« circles around the wholesale aesthetisization of the worlds we inhabit and their collective ambivalences. On the one hand it is about the transformation of entire cities into all embracing vehicles for advertising and on the other, the artistic engagement with such glamour-filled concepts, which are posited neither on an affirmative appreciation nor a simple critique of commodity aesthetics. The frequently conceptual character of the works distils for its part more the visual potential of these applied aesthetics taken from advertising and marketing strategies, rendering them accessible on the abstract level of replacement.

In this way the Austrian artist Andreas Fogarasi investigates the culturalisation of economics and the social functionalisation of art as a brand and location factor. »Culture« and »leisure« are not thus antagonistic agencies, but rather equal predicates of successful City marketing. Fogarasi's sculptural objects assume the appellative character of such strategies and yet formulate open reference systems that allow the viewer the freedom to make up his or her own mind. A wooden construction placed in front of a window facade in the foyer lends itself as a viewing platform, even though the view thus afforded is not necessarily the most spectacular. As a utility object it indicates much more the different contextualisation that this platform to which this platform can be subject: it can be an artwork or set the scene for the viewing of supposed urban sights. Three aluminium plates bearing the engraved names of Innsbruck, Tyrol and Austria exist not unlike abstract logos in space. Their historical reference is made up of a photographic series of bridge piers into which the 18th Century city arms of Bordeaux - three intertwined half-moons - has been etched. »Branding« is revealed here to be an Enlightenment project that architecture itself has directly internalised, whereas the search for an unequivocal interpretation characterising the Austrian word marks can be attributed to Modernism.

In his video »These Days« from 2005, the Croatian David Maljkovic shows the Italian Pavilion from the former exhibition centre in Zagreb, in which leading car shows used to be held. Now the futurist building provides the backdrop for young men and women to sit in their cars and exchange phrases deriving from an »Easy English« primer. The English language presumably provides access to the glamorous West, although the preparation for a better life in the West is seemingly permanently on hold. Maljkovic has created a series of collages to accompany the film that defamiliarize photographs from the exhibition halls' heyday and yet at the same time remind one of the promise implicit in this ambitious architecture.

Bernhard Kahrmann's video works comprise minimalistically choreographed loops that evoke diffuse atmospheres with their non-figurative images. Without a sound track and presented on monitors in black and white, the videos are fascinating by means of their suggestive light and passages of movement which are in turn are both familiar and alien at the same time. The images do not coalesce into faces, but are experienced as a condition and a feeling. Abstract forms and reflective light enter into a symbiosis, which diffusely evokes glamorous spatial scenarios without providing any specific instances for comparison.

Pernille Kapper Williams from Denmark on the other hand focuses upon the surface of things, the suggestive power of names and the seductive strategies of economics. In this way the ambivalently emotional charge of the perfumes' names - Envy, Obsession, Mania - are presented on a wall in the original typography, whereas a pedestal painted with black gloss becomes a fictional flacon, the carrier of precious substances and the frame of art at the same time. Framed shopping bags with patterns (golden polka dots, brocade embroidery) suggest a particular value and worth diametrically opposed to the kind of goods that would normally be in the kind of bags generally used in cheap shops. The unfurled fragments of our consumerist environment become self-reflexive symbols, which offer themselves as a projection surface without sacrificing their inherent ambivalences.