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“Fünf Räume” (German for ‘Five Rooms’) presents five emerging artists from Austria who have each been given the opportunity to transform a distinct space within the galleries of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, creating new, site-specific installations.
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“The installation pieces, all created onsite, isolate the viewer who then becomes part of the artwork, creating a dialogue between body and space. The experience interweaves numerous binaries – order and chaos, openness and barriers, inside and outside.”
Valentin Ruhry, Untitled (Hello World), 2011. Installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of The Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
Fünf Räume
The Austrian Cultural Forum New York
“Fünf Räume” (German for ‘Five Rooms’) presents five emerging artists from Austria who have each been given the opportunity to transform a distinct space within the galleries of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, creating new, site-specific installations.
The installation pieces, all created onsite, isolate the viewer who then becomes part of the artwork, creating a dialogue between body and space. The experience interweaves numerous binaries – order and chaos, openness and barriers, inside and outside – inspired by the distinct and famed architecture of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
The Eyes are Not Here, There are No Eyes Here by Daniel Domig is a site-specific construction which functions as a space within a space. The piece establishes a distinction between being inside or outside of the piece and forces the viewer to explore the perspective from which the paintings, and art itself, is viewed.
In his paintings and installations, Daniel Domig takes an anthropological approach to the human psyche. His work explores contemporary painting and its self-awareness.
Clemens Hollerer’s installation for the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, titled On the Other Side, alludes to forbidden territory, which is typically delineated by a fence or barricade, and reveals not only physical barriers, but also social, cultural and political ones. The elements, taken from a series of photographs of construction sites, are distorted and rearranged to challenge the viewer to consider the deeper meaning of borders within a metropolitan city and the transformative property of space.
Hollerer works in a variety of media, including site-specific installations, sculpture, and photography. He sees construction sites as a mirror of contemporary human life – flexible, mobile, and ever-changing.
For her installation The Empty Mirror at the ACFNY, Zenita Komad invited Austrian sculptor Michael Kienzer, who is known for re-imagining mundane materials to disturb their intended function, to collaborate. Their allegorical installation is composed of three elements (mirrors, chairs, and words) and has several layers of meaning and deep connections to mythology, poetry, and spirituality. Upon entering the space, the installation forces the viewer to enter a situation of self-reflection, inspired by an old Buddhist parable, and focuses the importance of the other through a mirroring of oneself. Based loosely on the fabled invention of chess, the work centers on the number 64 – the number of squares on a chessboard. The 16 mirrored chairs, positioned like dancers in a ballet, represent the pawns, which for Komad are the soul of the game. For the artists in collaboration, the loss of self became an important element as both had to challenge their individual practice to create a cohesive whole.
Hello World by Valentin Ruhry, composed of 4,750 illuminated rocker switches, speaks to both an interest in technology and the visual language of Minimalism. The switches represent simplicity of technology through the use of a binary number system – 0 and 1 – while the illuminated message is a nod to the most basic syntax of programming language, which developers often use to test new operating systems by displaying the words “Hello World” on a screen. The piece creates a dialogue surrounding the foundation of modern technology that now seems out-dated.
Ruhry creates analytical and scientific works inspired by technological achievements, though he is often inspired by out-dated, obsolete ideas once believed to be visionary. One of his major themes is light and its modulation of volume as well as physically measurable qualities such as tension, force, and friction.
For Fünf Räume at ACFNY, Esther Stocker created two new, site-specific installations with strong connections to her established practice, yet fully integrated into the architecture of the exhibition space. For her two untitled pieces Stocker applies and deconstructs geometric shapes and grid structures into space, onto the floors, ceilings, and walls of the rooms, creating immersive installations.
Fascinated by formal paradoxes and the logic of contradiction. Stocker sees a structure as ordered and disordered at the same time. In her artwork Stocker is not searching for perfection, but for mistakes.
By manipulating spatial perception her shapes seem to explode into the third dimension. She explores the ambiguity of disharmony in harmony, regularities and irregularities, and the equality or inequality of lines. Calling attention to the fact that “we know nothing about space,” she questions Euclidian geometry and the assumption of space as a given entity. Fünf Räume is on view from May 24 – September 5, 2011.
