[2:18 min] herunterladen auf: Handy | computer & iPod | send feedback

Esra Ersen is interested in the formation of identity and its transformation in different contexts or power structures. Her work “Carousel” shown in the exhibition tanzimat (Augarten Contemporary 21.1.2010 - 16.5.2010) was produced with high school students from Cologne. Ersen asked the students to model Turkish heads out of clay.

[2:33 min] herunterladen auf: Handy | computer & iPod | send feedback

Gulsun Karamustafa is a contemporary artist and film maker from Turkey. In 2009 she was the artist in residence at the Augarten Contemporary in Vienna. For the exhibition tanzimat (Augarten Contemporary 21.1.2010 - 16.5.2010) she produced a new piece entitled “modernity unveiled/interweaving histories”. In the interview with CYA Karamustafa talks about this piece.

[1:41 min] herunterladen auf: Handy | computer & iPod | send feedback

Franz Kapfer is an artist from Austria. His interest lies in patterns of representation.
In his work “Trophies” in exhibition tanzimat (Augarten Contemporary 21.1.2010 - 16.5.2010) he examines cliché representations of Turkish motives in Austrian architecture.

It is an interesting fact that the fez, the iconic Turkish hat that was originally instituted as a “modernizing” symbol for the Ottoman Empire in 1826, was later banned in Turkey in 1925, also as part of a “modernizing” reform. It is also interesting to note that after the invention of synthetic dyes, the main manufacturer of the fez—which up until that point had been colored with native berry juice—was located in Austria, that is, until it was boycotted by Turkey in 1908, as part of yet another reaction to modernization. The “history” of this simple, cliché-ridden object demonstrates the complexity of historical constructs not only of the Ottoman Empire, but within the grand narrative of modernity overall.

As shown through this minor but telling symbolic object, history is not a clear-cut dichotomy of oppositions between “East and West”, the oppressed and emancipated, “natives” and “outsiders”, or “modernized” and “un-modernized”. Instead, history is a series of intersections, clashes, meetings, and interruptions between elements coming from many different directions, a condition that requires us to always keep in mind the agenda, the perspective, the position of every historical narrative. In German, the same word, “Geschichte”, is used for two separate English terms, “story” and “history”—yet another indication that the “story”, the constructed, fictional element, can never be taken out of the “history”.

[5:49 min] herunterladen auf: Handy | computer & iPod | send feedback

In the exhibition, tanzimat, at the Augarten Contemporary, the conflicted symbol of the fez appears in the work, Carousel, by the Turkish artist, Esra Ersen, for which she recruited students at a high school in Cologne (from various backgrounds, including Turkish) to create clay models of Turkish heads, and the work, In the Eyes of a Mute, by the Romanian artist, Viktor Man, which juxtaposes a comic-like drawing of Turks he drew as a child against conceptual pieces addressing the same period in history. We also find these fez-donning depictions of Turks in the work, Trophies, by the Austrian artists, Franz Kapfer, which in this case, are not children’s portrayals, but rather reproductions of trophies that are still displayed in the Spanish Riding School today.

The exhibition, tanzimat, is named for a period of reformation in the Ottoman Empire which occurred from 1839 to 1876, and was notable for its various efforts towards modernization, which included the enhancement of civil liberties and the establishment of technological, financial, and social reforms. The term is not capitalized for the title of the exhibition—as opposed to the term for the historical period—an indication that the original meaning of the word, “arrangement” or “rearrangement”, is even more significant to the exhibition than the historical period. Artists from various Middle European backgrounds, Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Austrian, were invited to challenge and confront this process of rearrangement within their own histories. Developed in parallel to the major Prince Eugen of Savoy exhibition at the Lower Belvedere, tanzimat examines the continual reorganization of historical constructs and devices that underscore the neverending project of modernity. (jn)

a ) animals that belong to the emperor, b) embalmed ones, c) tamed ones, d) suckling pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous ones, g) stray dogs, h) those that are included in this classification, i) those that tremble as if they were mad, j) innumerable ones, k) those that are drawn with the finest camel hair brush, l) and so on, m) those that have broken the water jug, n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

This unusual taxonomy of the organisms from the animal realm, attributed by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges to a Chinese encyclopedia, was the inspiration for the French philosopher Michel Foucault for a book about the connection between our world of words and that of things.

What about this source had inspired Foucault? What exactly had moved him? In the preface of his book, he mentions that the reading of Borges’s enumeration had made him laugh. “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other.”

The laughter may just have sparked an uproar in the philosopher, one which caused a widespread, deep, uncomfortable feeling: that the terms with which we comprehend and keep the world in check – our system of classification that carefully orders the world – is only one among many, perhaps one that is just as impossible and disconcerting as the one in the Borges text.

Effects closely follow what we sense as wrong: the slapstick, the ridiculous, the ill-fitting, provocation, an apparent representation, the perception-changing, the offensive, and therefore, effects closely follow art. It is a characteristic of art that it confronts us with the unexpected, that it threatens the security of our expectations, of what seems normal to us, of what we are used to.

The exhibition, “Sense and Sentiment: Mistakes are closely followed by effects”, investigates the ability of art to unleash those sensations which push the viewer into uncharted and hitherto unimaginable territory. What is sensation? How can I manufacture it? Where does it take place? For the curators Sabeth Buchmann, Eva Maria Stadler, and Kathi Hofer, these questions are posed to the artists. In addition, from a curatorial standpoint, dealing with the phenomenon of sensation brings up questions such as: How do I notice something? How do I approach a painting? What happens to me in this moment? What is acting upon me?

This exhibition is at the Augarten Contemporary, a branch of the Belvedere in Vienna. On this home base, says Eva Maria Stadler, curator of contemporary art at the Belvedere, the museum is working on presenting young and current artists. One result of this effort is “Sense and Sentiment”, a collaboration of the Belvedere with the Academy of the Fine Arts in Vienna. In the course of a semester, positions of sensations and perceptions were investigated, artistically realized, and selected for the exhibition. Works of the students are on view, placed alongside works from well-known contemporary artists such as Constanze Ruhm, Julian Göthe, Heimo Zobernig, and Tony Conrad, as points of reference. The exhibition will run through May 24, 2009. Guided tours are also available and on the weekend of March 28th and 29th, artists and cultural theoreticians will explore sensations and their effects in lectures, films, and music in an event called “Saturday Sensations”. (wh/jn)