Irene Andessner began her career with painting. She first studied with Emilio Vedova, one of the most important Italian Informal painters, at the Academia di Belli Arti in Venice, and then with Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer—also a representative of the Informal—at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Andessner encountered paintings by the Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, for the first time at an exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The self-portraits fascinated her, and after an attempt to paint herself as Anguissola, she turned to the fields of photography and video art, in which she explores contemporary forms of the self-dramatization.

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Andessner’s portrait works are revivals of historical personalities that utilize memory as a source of reactivation: Marlene Dietrich, Electress Dorothea of Brandenburg, Wanda von Sacher Masoch, Irene Harand, Barbara Strozzi, Hedy Lamarr, Ida Pfeiffer, Maria Sibylle Merian, Barbara Blomberg, Gwen John, Constanze Mozart, Angelika Kaufmann, Frida Kahlo. The artist portrays over fifty personalities, primarily women, through role performance. The selection of her protagonists follows strict criteria: they are strong and politically involved women who were inventive, creative, aggressive, intelligent, and remarkable, who made an impression through their personalities or their approaches to life, however, often enough to be displaced into the lower and hidden ranks behind a male-dominated world and historiography.

Andessner is interested in how women have dealt with themselves throughout various centuries. In order to develop this approach, she investigates the life of her subjects, seeks out portraits of them, and then selects one of these picture-worthy moments as a starting point for her artistic embodiments. Through the conversion, the artist reflects on the models as social figures, as fictions of women as holy, untouchable superstars, as suffering, dominating, or promiscuous, and reenacts them partly faithfully, and partly as a reinterpretation with materials from our own time.

Andessner’s self-dramatizations take place either in the studio or in photographic situations that are recognizable as sets. Large polaroids are taken there. According to Andessner, the material was always important to her, since she also wanted to take a painterly approach to photography, which the polaroid material makes possible. When her self-dramatizations are done as videos, they also have a performative character and integrate others into the revivification.
When the artist mixes among people as Ursula K.—a scarred, depressed woman—in suburban bars, laundromats, and public saunas, or, in the live-streaming project, “Maternoster”, rides up and down the traveling lift compartments in a paternoster in the headquarters of the Federation of Austrian Industry with heads of business as Alma Mater, Maria von Nazareth, Mutter Courage (Anna Fierling), and Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, she approaches these self-dramatizations as real performances. Her restaged self then becomes evident through actual existing circumstances and thereby eliminates the boundaries of who she is. (wh/jn)

We live in a visual age. Our pastimes are often dictated by those things we like to observe, in art galleries, at the cinema, at the zoo. In this surveillance-heavy era, our desire to watch often goes unchecked. Cameras dictate our day-to-day existence, we chase after images that fit our expectations and concepts of beauty, of nature, of gaze-worthiness. Our eyes are trained to seek out, capture, and fix on that which has meaning to us and could be potentially shared.

But are we critical enough of that which we look at and the position from which we look at it? We set definitions for the subject and the object, we break down the constructs of viewing in the hopes that we don’t fall into a pre-manipulated, voyeuristic trap. Men should not objectify women, tourists should seek the unbeaten path, no one should remain in the position of “the other”. It’s rude to stare.

Art has always offered the possibility of not taking these positions for granted. For as long as art and artists have existed, there have always also been the viewers. In this day and age, reflexivity has given way to self-reflexivity. Every voyeur is also a voyee. Through her art, Liselot van der Heijden explores these ever-evolving visual positionings. In her compact, spare, but multi-layered installations, the viewer always plays an integral part in the set-up and therefore, naturally, passivity is not an option.

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Nature plays a big part in van der Heijden’s work. Drawing from an archive culled from nature documentaries, sightseeing trips, and media footage, the artist repeatedly reminds us through her work that even in our idyllic reception of “nature”, our position is always complicit, our intentions are not necessarily “pure”. In exhibitions such as “Aporia”, in which we are confronted by the a drawn-out version of a zebra’s last breath, or “Primate Visions”, in which the fourth walls of zoo habitats are broken down, or “Natural History”, in which observers of the dioramas at New York’s Museum of Natural History unwittingly project life into the life-like figures, anthropomorphism becomes an outdated concept in a far more complex mediation between the natural and the un-natural.

Originally from the Netherlands, the artist has been dividing her time between Amsterdam and New York for the last 15 years, and her bewilderment during the Bush Administration also found its way into her work. Shortly after 9/11, when Ari Fleischer memorably warned Americans to “watch what we say”, van der Heijden turned a watchful eye and ear on Bush, creating two video pieces: one consisting of a State of the Union address that has been stripped down to the words “America” (61 times) and another focusing on phrases such as “evil is real” and “God is near”, respectively, in addition to their accompanying standing ovations. Reflecting on mediation and complicity inevitably leads to reflecting on the political, and van der Heijden’s critical negotiation of the viewer can, in this case, also be applied to the citizen. (jn)

At the ripe old age of 35, Francisca Benitez calls herself a “retired architect”. When the Chilean-born artist first arrived in New York ten years earlier, her experience as an architect permanently shaped her view of the city. What she imagined as a creative, intellectually challenging profession, turned out to be an exercise in municipal bureaucracy—much of her work was about interpreting building codes and zoning restrictions, cutting through administrative red tape, and facing the challenges of a complex system of rules, regulations, and protocol.

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All of these obstacles, however, only served to further inform her unique perspective and conception of a sprawling urban landscape. She found that her attention was more and more drawn to those dimensions and spaces around her that may be overlooked, or taken for granted. Informed and inspired by her heroes, Gordon Matta-Clark and Ed Ruscha, she never lost sight of the bigger (or smaller) picture—that the jurisdiction of boundaries, lines, and interactions was a process that was constantly being defined, whether the results followed the modus operandi or not.

In a city as densely packed as New York, public space is always an issue. An endless procession of building up and tearing down, moving in and moving out, rumbling underground networks and soaring stories of skyscrapers, is accompanied by a constant series of negotiations between people, places, and properties. It is a fluid, flexible entity, but there are still lines that are drawn and maps that are plotted. In an era when exploration seems to be a tapped-out enterprise, the artist still finds novus terra incognita.

For Benitez, these opportunities seem to be everywhere. Her work is not so much about confrontation or intervention as it is about observing, recording, noticing. A ride on her bike leads to the discovery of ancient religious architectonic rituals that subtly transform alleys, backyards, and balconies in Williamsburg. A trip to her roof reveals spellbinding pigeon formations that represent power struggles between former street gang-members. An experiment of simple floor rubbings unearths a vast grid of previously unnoticed property lines.

But these engagements are not just about identifying hidden territories and demarcating space. They are also about personal encounters, chance meetings, mutually verified acknowledgments of positioning and re-positionings. In the end, public space is not just about vacant lots, “keep off” signs, or property issues. It’s about the human element that underlies them all. (jn)

150 Russian journalists, artists, art collectors, museum curators, and celebrities, 18 pieces of current Russian video art, 1 aeroplane of the airline S7 – named after the 2002 deceased artist Timur Novikov – and 10 hours time. It was the briefest, most extensive, most exclusive, and most celebratory presentation of contemporary Russian video art that foreign countries had ever seen.

From the organizers, Hans Knoll, a Viennese gallery owner with good connections to the Russian art scene, Pierre- Christian Brochet from the Muscovite B-Comm and Antonio Geusa, curator and recognized authority in all things regarding contemporary video art in Russia, landed at the Viennese airport.

CastYourArt asked Antonio Geusa for a quick update on Russian video art, from the Russian artist collective AES+F and Mamyshev Vladislav – artist name Monroe – up to Blue Noses and all the others.

Who plays a role in Russian video art? Which national and historical characteristics does this direction in art exhibit? What fascinates the curator at the moment and what trends can he identify?

Sneak a peek! 10 hours in 5 minutes, here we go!

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For a long time, contemporary art was strictly a national phenomenon in Turkey and was therefore, to a large extent, ignored internationally. This has changed. In the 1970s and 80s, artists such as Füsun Onur, Ayse Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger have begun to break through traditional and national orientations and to bring in international influences. As international attention grew stronger in the 90s and the Istanbul Biennales offered venues of presentation and publicity to the more progressive contemporary art of Turkey, awareness of the value of this art and its development was promoted locally. The recent generation of Turkish artists profited from these changes both thematically and professionally.

One of the internationally renowned Turkish artists of the post-2000 generation is Ahmet Ögüt. The past twelve months of the 27-year-old artist, who lives and works in Istanbul and Amsterdam, have been densely packed: his work has been featured in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, Athens, Eindhoven, Seoul, Helsinki, Santa Fe, Nimes, Malmö, Stockholm, Zagreb, London, Banja Luka, and Stuttgart. In addition, he has had solo exhibitions in Basel and Barcelona, three Biennales, as well as numerous online and print contributions.

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Painting, performance, video, sculpture, photography, design, installation—Ahmet Ögüt utilizes a variety of artistic media in order to provide multiple ways of accessing his ideas. In his work, he captures ordinary events: actions, articles, and situations which we encounter on a daily basis and take for granted, thereby no longer falling under our range of perception. The shrewd interventions in which Ahmet Ögüt positions these everyday occurrences bring the unexpected to the surface: the instituting of national power and the fixing of both social differences and indifferences. However, idealism, hope, individual resistance, and powerlessness also become apparent. It reminds us, says Ahmet Ögüt about the effect of his art, of something which we already know, but have forgotten to notice.

In place of the often hermetic approach of theory, the artist uses the anecdotal and playful absurd in order to address his audience. Despite this seemingly lighthearted approach, his work is also critical and exhibits a clear partiality towards the inquisitive, open-minded, experimental side of mankind. He wants, says Ahmet Ögüt, not to instruct, but to remind. In his artistic-political self-conception, he is not so much interested in grand narratives, but rather in modest anecdotes, which one can easily grasp. These do not require that much time in order to be understood, leaving enough time for us to mull them over. (wh/jn)

As you are looking at this podcast, you are looking into a monitor, be it on your laptop, your iPod, your mobile phone, etc. But how much time do you spend actually looking at your monitor, a physical object that one has come to take completely for granted? The point of a mobile world, in fact, is that these objects, through which we stay connected with an information-saturated world, are disposable—toys that we purchase and update on a regular basis, and, at the same rate, discard and forget about just as quickly.

In Noah Fischer’s work, one returns to looking at this neglected object, the monitor, in all its different versions and models over the ages—a technological “era” which only really covers about thirty years of time. The Brooklyn-based artist was first drawn to the monitor by noticing the predominance of them in trash heaps on the streets of New York. What was once a valuable, sought-out item as little as one or two years ago becomes worthless material for the junkyard today, and the cycle accelerates with the emergence of every shiny new model that appears in the store each year, month, week, even—as the regular lines of hungry customers at every new Apple store will attest.

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Noah Fischer brings this frantically mass-produced object back to its simple lo-tech origins: as a relic, a piece of furniture, and most poetically, as a light source—a kind of simple lantern emitting a soft, ethereal light. He re-introduces the most basic structural and aesthetic features of the object in terms of its color, its material, its form. As the newest models of monitors become ever-more streamlined, flatter, smaller, trying to divert attention, in fact, from their condition of being actual physical objects, the obsolete models that once enjoyed such state-of-the-art status become ever more strange and quaint in their outdated bulkiness—a quality made even stranger by the fact that early models of monitors were once a product of designers who even marked each of their works with their signatures.

In an age when video art represents the most cutting-edge medium of young artists, Noah Fischer turns the ubiquitous monitor—both figuratively and literally—on its head, evoking a decidedly modernist, Duchamp-ian gesture in the process. In this case, the signature on the object is his. (jn)

In the art world, one thing leads to another—this is the principle by which Hans Knoll began his career as an art dealer, which remains his guiding principle up until today. Knoll began in the early 80s with a space, a weekly dinner among friends, artists, and accompanying guests, and the possibilities that arose from this set-up led to exhibitions, performances, and music. These events were at the time more along the lines of occasions for bonding. However, they eventually turned into serious gallery events and the subsequent realization that one must expand beyond Vienna in order to truly develop in the art world.

In the first half of the 1980s, the young art dealer was already getting involved with the art world in Hungary. He founded an artists’ co-op in Budapest as a kind of communist counterpart to his gallery and thereby set himself apart in the art world from the surrounding East European countries. When the door between the East and West was opened, it became apparent to Knoll that his position would remain relatively neutral. He curated exhibitions that mediated both sides and by the beginning of the 1990s, he realized that the sudden massive interest from the West in art from the unknown Eastern European countries which accompanied the opening of the borders could be to some extent a temporary disadvantage.

Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 1

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 2

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 3

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 4

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Knoll realized that his ability to stay inspired during this time of upheaval required stamina. He often considered closing his gallery during this time, but in the end, he met the challenge and began to work in Moscow. He now finds St. Petersburg a very exciting place for art.

Knoll’s desire to develop, to network, as well as his stability and his realistic grasp of his own possibilities and limitations have opened many doors for him in the art world. He works very closely with Blue Noses und AES+F, from Russia, as well as representing the Hungarian artists, Ákos Birkás und Csaba Nemes. In Austria, the Gallery Knoll also represents artists such as Mara Mattuschka und Wilhelm Scherübl. (wh/jn)

“If somebody would come and wash my car, it would be nice. It would be nice, it would be done, but I wouldn’t pay for it. Sometimes I think that for many people, this is the same with art.”

Eva Jiricka, video and performance artist from Prague, translates intellectual concepts into everyday life in her work. She deals with concepts of others, of sexuality, of the menace of the stranger, of cities, as well as of the artist’s existence. There often exist prejudices which we consciously or unconsciously carry around with us and whose traces we leave behind in the form of actions, objects, writings, and visual templates, which we are fed to us by the media and which we gladly consume. In her video work, Jiricka reenacts these collective pictures. She represents them. She exposes them. She realizes them for us. She opens our eyes. Wide.

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During her stay as an artist-in-residence at the Galerie Space in Bratislava, made possible by the Visegrad Foundation, we had the opportunity to speak with Jiricka over her work and her artistic self-understanding. The video sequences shown in the podcast were provided to us from the artist. They include clips from her works from 2004-2008: “New Home”, “Morning Cleaning”, “Drive”, “Merkmale” (“Characteristics”), and “Shit in the Garden”. (wh/jn)

Art is there for people and for the most part, people will come to the art. Sometimes, however, art comes to the people–provided that someone has enough of the enthusiasm and commitment to bring it to them. We had an interview with one such “gallery nomad” in the name of art.

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Ivana Madariová, curator of the Galerie Space, occasionally leaves the premises of her gallery on Stefánikova Road in Bratislava and goes on the road with her art. Then the Space becomes Nomadspace, in order to get closer to the people, in order to bring art onto the streets and into public spaces, and to get passers-by interested in the young artists of the gallery. In order to render the art mobile, a small transporter was converted in 2007, and the first destinations were multimedia and film festivals in Slovakia, in addition to Re:Sonance in Vienna, Artissima in Turin, Zurich, and the 9th International Festival of Contemporary Art for Women in the Slovenian capital, Laibach. Nomadspace features mainly video art. It must bring attention to itself on the fly and communicate with pedestrians on the road. The approaches towards doing this vary quite a bit. In the case of the artists’ group, Azzoro, from Poland, it is the irony and performativity to which they refer, in the case of Zbynek Baladran, one of the most well-known Czech video artists, he creates a balancing act between sociopolitical-philosophical depth and a corresponding visual form with his video series. Lenka Cisarova, refers to the curator, Madariová, as an example of recent art from Bratislava. A project from the student of fine arts in Bratislava, which involves a dancing ballerina in a box, fits well into the “Cargobox” of the small transporter, the showroom of Nomadspace - a gallery underway. (wh/jn)