The Munchies Art Club shares with you from this years upcoming Parallel Vienna the artists Kaja Clara Joo, Neda Nikolic, Paul Spendier, Daniela Trinkl, Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller.
The PARALLEL VIENNA one of Austria’s top art events turns ten this year!!!!
The 10th edition will take place for the second time in a row at the impressive former maternity clinic Semmelweisklinik in the 18th Viennese district.
The Parallel is a wonderful mix of contemporary art festival, event, happening, art fair, exhibition platform, and artists’ studio.
A unique event for all art lovers and beyond.
The Parallel curatorial team has invited emerging as well as established artists from Austria and abroad.
Around 170 rooms of the Semmelweiss in the 18th Viennese district will be filled by over 600 artistic positions and additionally presenting an exciting performance program, creating an unparalleled experience for its visitors and those involved.
On the edge of discomfort, futile machines and a kiss with a mouthful of breadcrumbs: In her artistic practice Kaja Clara Joo (*1991) examines the notions of spatiality, intimacy and hidden narratives.
Organic and impermanent structures collide with heavy industrial materials.
Her sculptures radiate an unasked closeness, badgering the viewer to participate with a troubled gaze.
Inspired by historic dental braces she will stage a site- specific apparatus out of a couple hundred steel strings and rubber for the Parallel Art Fair this year.
It’s limbs seem to pull at every corner of the small, narrow space in an attempt to expand the room. In the midst of this tense construction we find a movie being installed on top of a massive, vertical steel pole.
A couple of friends exchange anecdotes and reflections upon the mouth as a semi- communal, highly private yet public territory.
“Space in itself does not simply exist as a ´given´ but affects things which are always becoming.” *
In the tightness of their surrounding the visitor is confronted with questions of socially produced spaces, gestures of beauty and power as well as atrocious kisses shared with strangers.
*Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space / Phil Hubbard / SAGE Publications, 2001
About 10 years ago I came to Vienna to live and study.
Before that I was based in Serbia(Leskovac, Belgrade) where I used to study painting in more classical way.
Beside painting I made some performances, site-specific installations and mechanical sculptures during my studies at Angewandte.
I had a few solo- and group exhibitions in Vienna, Serbia and Greece.
Some of my subjects were/still are communication in virtual world, transcription of digital into analog and space in video games.
I am interested in memories which can be carried with us when the suitcase is not big enough.
I like to tell a story through my work but also like to hear other people's stories.
For some time now, my work is concentrated around a subject of playground, or space which can be used for play.
Think about objects from your childhood, a slide, a ball, carousel, favorite floor or carpet.
Think about dark forest with a glimpse of light, about jumping castle under the moonlight.
Think about smell of food in the kindergarten or smell of freshy mowed grass in summer.
The ball was red, a slide was yellow, the walls were old.
Sometimes it was loud.
Now reduce all the atributes.
That's the space I am aiming for.
My name is Paul. I am an artist based in Vienna.
I mainly work with sculpture, installation and video and study Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna right now.
For a current series of sculptures, I look at ways to remodel industrial objects: shapes that are formerly defined by high technical efficiency shift into organic forms more similar to natural entities.
I created a series of small sculptures that look like airplanes morphed into the shape of a snake biting its own tail.
It’s a symbol for being endlessly enclosed in oneself, and infinity.
Also, the corporate design that’s inspired by real-life airlines then becomes readable as a brightly colorful snakeskin pattern.
Before I started working on the sculpture I am going to show at Parallel 2022, videos and images showing wind turbines bending and buckling in situations where exposed to excessive wind fascinated me.
One particularly well-known image shows a wind turbine in the aftermath of a hurricane in the U.S.
The rotors hang limp, looking like lifeless limbs or wilted leaves. In another picture taken in Germany, the entire mast has collapsed, like a plant that was knocked over when someone carelessly stepped on it.
The wreckage is reminiscent of withered, broken plants, and evokes the same sad sentiment, despite the non-comparable difference in scale.
I love how people can collectively feel pity for an industrial object that is otherwise only known in a state of permanent function, with smooth, white surfaces and perfectly aerodynamic shapes.
I also cooperated with Luīze Nežberte, who took the sculpture as a starting point for a text. It's accompanying my object, but not as a classical exhibition text, but a work coming out of her own writing practice.
Daniela Trinkl's sculptural work reminds of creatures from a bizarre science fiction world, enigmatic beings and abstract symbols, and is characterized by a very specific aesthetic.
The artist works with both natural and synthetic materials, her favorite being the plastic polyurethane foam.
In her studio in Vienna's 18th district, she sprays, cuts and grinds objects from it in various formats.
As the daughter of a civil engineer, Trinkl has an affinity for hardware stores and its industrially produced materials.
A few years ago, she discovered the material for her work.
It attracts her strongly because of its haptic and visual qualities.
The liquid foam expands after being sprayed on, thus appearing alive and eventually solidifying into an amorphous mass.
Due to its vivid surface structure, the different colors as well as its imitative qualities, it represents a highly attractive material for the artist. In her work Trinkl adresses themes such as biology, technology as well as the archaic, mysticism and mythology.
She is currently researching the topic of plastic and its effects as microplastics on the environment in general and on biological life and its evolution in particular.
For example, scientists have discovered a new species on the microplastic particles in the ocean.
The artist is fascinated by the idea of the emergence of a possible form of new life through the interbreeding of synthetic and organic material.
In this respect, she is simultaneously attracted and repelled by the creative and inventive potential of humans and what can come out of it.
In Trinkl's art, these poles are expressed both critically and humorously. The hybrid appearance of her sculptures is alluring and evocative, yet at the same time strange and irritating.
Plastics have exerted a strong attraction on humans from the very beginning. What was once touted as a utopian material and the solution to many problems, has now become a dystopia for the planet.
Trinkl's works make these double levels perceivable.
We are a German-Austrian art duo and work together since our joint studies at the Angewandte in Vienna.
As visual artists, the focus of our work is in the areas of film and animation and equally object, in all its media staging forms.
Maybe it is a bit due to our time at the Angewandte that we actually like to work on applied objects and artifacts, we think about what things could be, what they could do, what actions and rituals they enable.
But also how functional things work as bodies and surfaces, how different surfaces are made – even as illusions – or how we can imagine them to feel like.
In the process, we have been working for over 15 years with an archive of industrially manufactured plastic turned parts, which we use as a kind of modular system both for film, photography and installation work.
Or as a blueprint for large-scale objects, which we realize as pneumatic bodies and figures.
We recently created a mise en scène for the MAK Center in Los Angeles together with the Californian architecture duo Current Interests, and at Parallel we are also showing an installation with pneumatic light bubbles as part of their section Interventions.
For this year's location in the former Semmelweis Clinic this is very appealing, as the space we are showing was formerly used as an operating room and the intervention with the retro-like plastic objects transforms the whole into a sci-fi like scenery.
September 6th-11th
Semmelweisklinik
Tuesday 17:00 - 22:00
Wednesday 13:00 - 20:00
Thursday 13:00 - 20:00
Friday 09.09 13:00 - 20:00
Saturday 10.09 12:00 - 19:00
Sunday 11.09 12:00 - 19:00
