FLUC posters for DISPLAY PRATERSTERN project in connection with issues relating to the parliamentary election in Austria in October 2017.
Participating Artists:
Akram Al Halabi / Ovidiu Anton / Catrin Bolt / Anna Ceeh / Katrina Daschner / Petja Dimitrowa / Ines Doujak / Gregor Eldarb / Christian Egger / Scott Clifford Evans / Amina Handke / Anna Jermolaewa / Johanna & Helmut Kandl / Marcus Neustetter / Female Obsession / FXXXXX / Jianan Qu / Esra Özmen / Denise Palmieri / Katrin Plavcak / Oliver Ressler / Iv Toshain / Tim Sharp / Hansel Sato / Christina Werner Read More…
The series of seven photos shows details from abandoned clothing, furniture and other household articles. These personal chattels are located in an industrial building in Tivoli, Italy, which has long been empty. The images document one small part of the disintegrating former paper factory where discursive personal narratives of place, time and intention intersect with the more general categories of history, migration and homelessness. Who left these things here? Who regarded the space as a refuge and under what conditions did they leave? Despite the wealth of detail provided by the images, the series raises more questions that it can answer. They are evidence without explanation, a story with an open end. Read More…
The photo collage is based on reproduced material relating to the old French colonial Palais de Justice. The building housed birth, death, marriage and criminal records of the colonial administration.
Built in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Aspang Station was part of the Vienna – Thessalonica railway project. From 1939 to 1942 it was the station from which over 47 train loads of Viennese Jews were deported – over 50,000 people. After the war and Austrian independence the station went into slow decline till it was eventually demolished in 2001 and the site scheduled to be part of a large-scale redevelopment project.
The sight of machines removing the tracks and digging trenches into the former platforms seemed particularly evocative especially since the safety barriers round the excavation had the same colours as the Austrian flag. With issues of restitution and memorialisation still being debated in Austria, the visual image also resonated up with the historically racist elements of Western tradition – measuring and classifying “races” and assigning them a position on a scale of purported civilisation. The US laws classifying anyone with “one drop of black blood” as non-white; legal sterilisations carried out on Native Americans and asylum patients into the 1970s; the invention and propagation of the pseudo-science of eugenics throughout Europe, etc. Read More…
The series re-works 6 hand-coloured photographs from the end of the 19th century showing Heligoland, Norderney and Venice. Inserted into the settings (tourist, travel and holiday destinations) is a single image of a young woman, a Berber from North Africa, probably Algeria. It is taken from a two volume work published in Berlin in 1910 – Das Weib im Leben der Völker by Albert Friedenthal, most “from my own collection,” as the author says.
Interwoven with these historically contiguous elements are seven texts in the form of separate, extended quotations from SCRAM: Relocating under a new Identity by James S. Martin. The short ‘captions’ at the bottom of the photos themselves also come from this source. Published in Washington in 1993, the book is effectively a handbook with legal and not so legal tips about how to divest oneself of one identity and acquire another. Wiping the slate clean. Building a new life. Starting again somewhere else. It demands the total erasure of one life and the assumption of another, justifying it by the fact that the authorities provide the same “service” and relocation possibilities to criminals. Read More…
The photograph is one of the coincidences of material and history that probably happen more often than we notice. In 2001 I was given a number of rolls of old film which had been subjected to fire damage and subsequent water damage. Much of the film was glued together as a result and it continued to deteriorate further at a rapid rate. I managed to determine that it was a copy of an adaptation of Schnitzler’s Liebelei, the title frames disintegrating in my hands. I was able to save a few frames of a woman’s face, discoloured and in the process of dissolution. The image here is one of them. A few weeks later the material was almost totally decomposed and had to be disposed of. Read More…
A protest against the Freedom Party (FPÖ) / Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP) coalition of 2000.