This year’s Curated by theme is titled KELET which means East in Hungarian. East, as this year’s focus lies on the war taking place in the Ukraine. Vienna being one of the closest western neighbours, has felt a strong bond and feeling of alliance since the beginning.
The Curated by celebrates its 14th edition as a Viennese Gallery festival which takes place over the Period of one month.
There are 24 galleries taking part in this year’s Curated by. We cant say for sure how many galleries we will actually visit, but we are 100% sure we are heading to these seven favourites:
The Charim Gallery, Martin Janda Gallery, Kandlhofer Gallery, Christine König Gallery, Gallery Georg Kargl, Gabrielle Senn Gallery, and the Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Gallery.
The Curated by takes place in Vienna from the 9.9-8.10 2022
Friday 9.9. and Saturday 10.09., 12pm - 6pm
Between 13.09. - 08.10.2022
Tuesday - Friday 12pm-6pm
Saturdays 12pm-4pm
The entrance to the exhibitions is free of charge.
The Charim gallery presents the exhibition titled Insolvency, my friend, curated by Nicholas Tammens featuring works from the artists Olga Balema, Dora Budor, Guillaume Dustan, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Mees, Josephine Pryde, Rosemarie Trockel.
Dorotheergasse 12/1, 1010 Vienna
Tuesday - Friday 11 am - 6 pm
Saturday 11 am - 2 pm
and by appointment
Dealing with forms of circulation and exchange, this exhibition includes works by Olga Balema, Dora Budor, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Mees, Josephine Pryde, Rosemarie Trockel and a film by Guillaume Dustan.
It began with a point of interest, Pierre Klossowski’s essay “Living Currency”, and departed into a series of associations between artists and works that present no reliable narration.
In a variety of approaches these works materialise the effects of such systems while looking at the position of the artist, the work, and its spectator in relation to them.
About the curator:
Nicholas Tammens (b. Australia) is the Assistant Curator at Kunstverein Hamburg.
He is also founder of 1856, a curated program of exhibitions and events at a workers’ union parliament in Melbourne, Australia which focuses on conditions of labour and cultural production.
He has produced exhibitions such as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kunstverein in Hamburg (2022), Stars Down to Earth (with Sung Tieu), Galerie Barbara Weiss (2021), Jef Geys, Yale Union (2018), Patricia L. Boyd, 1856 (2018), Fred Lonidier, 1856 (2017), and B. Wurtz (2015); presented talks at Kunsthal Bergen (2021), Wiels, Brussels (2019), and Kunsthalle Zurich (2019); and has wrote for Mousse Magazine (Milan) and May Revue (Paris).
The Martin Janda Gallery presents the exhibition Reroute—Reorient curated by Asier Mendizabal featuring works from the artists Goshka Macuga, Mangelos, Ciprian Muresan, Roman Ondak and Tania Pérez Córdova.
Eschenbachgasse 11, 1010 Wien
Tuesday - Friday 11 am - 6 pm
Saturday 11 am - 4 pm
When lost, perplexed, or shocked, we feel the need to reorient ourselves. That is the term we use to define the adjustment to a new situation that might have come about after a sudden, unforeseeable or unfathomable change. To reorient, to orient again, refers, of course, to a spatial notion.
By re- establishing a cardinal reference (east, north...) as a spatial metaphor, we determine a position relative to our surroundings, but also, to an uncertain present.
This spatial metaphor of adjusting to a compass differs from the way in which contemporary positioning navigation systems deal with being astray. Rerouting, the term popularised by GPS based systems as the corrective action unequivocally determined by data collection, is different from reorienting.
It suggests a calculus of all the possible ways, tracks, and paths after a wrong turn, as if they were all simultaneously available and it were only a matter of computational power to identify the right one.
Not so much a directional notion that can always be summoned as an aim –as orientation seemed to suggest – but an indiscriminate scanning of all possible bifurcations, of separating lines out of an indistinct mesh.
If we stretched the analogy of this pair to the subsequent global events that have characterised our present as one of incertitude and bewilderment, we would have to admit that the optimistic, technified mode of positioning ourselves suggested in rerouting entails a naturalised ideological worldview, made of pragmatic choices. Or, conversely, that we have lost trust in any valid anchor point towards which to rearrange our efforts, as an imagined trajectory drawn by a line.
Lines as trajectories or vectors, but also as connectors and as borders feature as a recurrent element in the works that thread this exhibition. These are the three main uses for lines in diagrammatic representations: projecting, connecting, and separating.
In all cases, they imply the relation between two entities: a given position, and an aim, in a trajectory, two related elements in a connector, or two planes after a cut – the line is the representation of mediation but is never on either side of the dichotomy. A timeline, two connected units or two divided areas imply a diametrical connection between two things and, therefore, a specular relation and a threshold.
Janus, the Roman god of doors and thresholds, is always represented as a double face, looking simultaneously in two opposite directions. Backwards and forwards, inwards and outwards, into the future and into the past. Its constitution is the exact inversion of a mirror.
Whereas the reflection of one’s face in a surface creates an inward illusion of introspection, the faces turned outwards in the representations of Janus create an axis at the point in which each gaze cannot encounter the other. The threshold is always elusive. Irrepresentable. Maybe this is why Janus also presided the dealings between war and peace.
Goshka Macuga’s International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (2016) features a group of portraits connected by rods which draw a diagrammatic relation between them. It remains unclear whether the lines link or separate these faces, but as in a multifaceted Janus, they cannot look at each other.
The title of the series and the subtitle for this particular configuration (End of God: Madame Blavatsky, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Monster of Frankenstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Darwin) directs the reading towards the historical recurrence of the utopian notion by which cultural exchanges and relations would necessarily foster a peaceful stability.
The ambivalence of the function of the connecting rods, simultaneously linking and separating the portraits, suggests an analogue impossibility as the axis/threshold in the Janus head.
When Ciprian Muresan overlaps several partial casts of busts in Untitled (Portrait), 2021, the multifaceted structure of Macuga’s constellation seems to condense in an equivalent paradox.
This method of overlapping is recurrent in Muresan’s work, most notably in his accumulation of lines which, as in a palimpsest, form simultaneous layers of what in its original form would be linearly organised pages in a book (All the Images from the Complete collection catalogue of S.M.A.K., 2019).
It is a spatially paradoxical representation of time, both in its overlapping and transparency, and in its spreading throughout the support generating a surface reminiscent of a map.
The contour of an absent rear-view mirror, identified in the title of Roman Ondak’s work, Erased Wing Mirror (2013), also denies the reflection of our face, suggesting the impossibility not only of facing ourselves as other, but also of looking back, which is, after all, what rear-view mirrors allow us to do.
Placed over a relief map, the cut-out mirror evokes the idea of journey and of borders as inevitably linked to the temporal dimension of travel, and the difficulty to orient ourselves in absence of a historical perspective.
Ondak returns to the trope of the mirror, albeit less explicitly, in his new piece Parallel Worlds (2022), in which the two contiguous representations of a globe, where the lines that represent latitude and longitude of the geographic coordinate system are engraved, overlapping the concentric growth lines of the section cut of a tree.
The ideal nature of the geographical divisions contrasts with the irreducible material condition of the organic tree, not unlike the way in which Tania Pérez Córdova’s Contour #12 (2021) draws a threshold by pouring bronze into a sand mould of lines which, far from their diagrammatical abstraction, spill out of their borders.
The lines of ruled notebooks replicated in all Mangelos’s painted manifestos seem similarly imperfect. Hesitant and contingent, they seem almost incapable of fulfilling their function of straightening the calligraphy into a systematic logic.
The cadence of the line that constitutes the handwriting in these works (Hamurabi Manifesto, Energia, Manifesto on Thinking No. 1, all dated between 1971 and 1978) is no less decisive than the abstract template that should have normalised it by subjecting it to the order of the parallel lines.
For more head to the Galerie Martin Janda website.
The Gallery Kandlhofer presents the exhibition THE BODY IS SACRAMENT curated by KJ Freeman featuring works from the artists Harry Gould Harvey IV, Nathaniel Oliver, Catalina Ouyang and Calli Roche.
Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Wien
Tuesday-Friday: 11am - 6pm
Saturday: 11am - 4pm
The Body is Sacrament is an investigation into the East vs West dichotomy as a paradigm that supports imperialism and nationalism.
Placing together the works of four American artists – Calli Roche, Catalina Ouyang, Harry Gould Harvey, and Nathaniel Oliver – this show will explore the way in which hierarchical social structures, such as class, race, gender, and ability, systematically divorce certain Americans from their own Western identity.
At the same time, however, the East provides no relief for such marginalized people.
The Body is Sacrament will dig deeper at this geographical and cultural binary in order to understand the ways in which the East, as well as the West, becomes an oppressive construct that serve to maintain control over citizens of nation states.
The East gets rendered as the esoteric opposite of the West, in which the sacred is treated as science. In turn, the West enforces a seemingly empirical ethics of the enlightenment.
By exploring these ideas, KJ Freeman is interested in searching for solace beyond the confines and indoctrination of Western ethics.
Elements of sadomasochism that prop these systems at large seep into the works of Calli Roche and Catalina Ouyong. These artists’ use of leather, fabric, wax and discarded ephemera signal a cathartic purge that transform raw material into biblical-like relics.
Harry Gould Harvey’s constellation of systems of divinity echo these sentiments, while Nathaniel Oliver’s attention to Creole deities and Afro-futurist imagery, paints the architecture of jazz as a sonic practice that is at once mathematical and mythical, deeply rooted in ancient African spiritual practices that predate the problematic division of the globe.
KJ’s approach to curation is holistic and driven by an overarching need to frame and high- light the unseen.
KJ Freeman (b. 1992) is an artist and curator who was born and raised in New York City.
KJ started HO SING gallery in 2017 to provide a space for Black and brown artists, especially those who have been historically excluded from the art world. KJ tackles identity formation and deconstructs normative structures through her curatorial practice.
In 2021, KJ received the Armory’s Gramercy International Prize for experimental New York based galleries. KJ has also spoken at the LISTE art fair and has been a fellow in the New Museum Seminars.
The Gallery Georg Kargl presents the exhibition titled I Had a Dog and a Cat curated by Hana Ostan Ožbolt. With works from the artists David Fesl, Andreas Fogarasi, Katalin Ladik, Denisa Lehocká, David Maljković, Josse Pyl, Michael E. Smith, Kazuna Taguchi.
Schleifmühlgasse 5, 1040 Vienna
Tue - Fr 13.00 - 19.00
and by appointment
Georg Kargl Fine Arts is pleased to present the exhibition "I Had a Dog and a Cat", inspired by the life and work of Josef Čapek (1887, Hronov – 1945, Bergen-Belsen), an artist and writer, who challenged the existing thinking and behaviour of his time.
Featuring works by eight contemporary artists, the exhibition draws a parallel between the animals from the children's book "All About Doggie and Pussycat" (J. Čapek, 1929), which transform everyday tasks at their home into creative and exceptional situations, and the selected artists, who, each in their own way, share the involvement of combining divergent things and situations that might otherwise not meet.
Collisions and contradictions, present in the ordinary and the common, give rise to truly authentic responses.
The exhibition design is based on the occurrence of natural light within the existing conditions of the building and the physical experience of the body in the space.
The Christine König Gallery presents for Curated by 2022 SEMMI SEM SEMMI curated by Róna Kopeczky and featuring works from the artist ENDRE TÓT.
Schleifmühlgasse 1a, 1040 Vienna
Tuesday to Friday 11 am - 6 pm
Saturday 11 am - 4 pm
Presented by Christine König Galerie in the framework of the curated by program, the exhibition entitled SEMMI SEM SEMMI features works by Endre Tót, one of the most significant figures of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde generation, as well as an emblematic figure of international conceptual and mail art.
The works comprised in the show were realized between the early 1970s and the 2010s, after Tót gave up abstract expressionist and Informel – painting in 1970, only to return to the painterly gesture in total secrecy in the 1980s and to reveal this fact in the Summer of 2021.
During these five decades, the Hungarian artist elaborated and unfolded thematic conceptual series in a variety of (new) media such as artist books, telegrams, postcards, typewriting, postal and rubber stamps, video, posters, graffiti, banners or actions.
The pieces on view in the exhibition investigate the three fundamental concepts he conceived by 1971, termed Zer0, Joy and Rain, that were elaborated as conceptual survival strategies using derision and humour against the grim Socialist everyday life.
In the light of this year’s traumatic geopolitical events, the war in Ukraine raging at our borders, and the still prevailing East-West dichotomy that shapes our existence, Endre Tót’s life – balancing between Hungary and West Germany since 1979 – and works remain sharply relevant, contemporary, therefore offering a visual, conceptual antidote to our anxious times.
The concept and motif of Zer0 first made its appearance in the artist’s mail art activity, a form of artistic communication that conveyed perfectly his idea-based art, while also constituting the only means to initiate correspondence as early as 1971 with the most prominent figures of the international avant-garde from behind the iron curtain.
For Tót, the Zer0 sign, which embodied the mathematical concept of nothing, primarily symbolised the absurdity of communication, but also the concepts of absence and presence, while the philosophical and political aspects of the character “0” certainly reflected an ontological approach of the condition of both citizens and artists under state Socialism.
The text, as a means of communication – was dangerous grounds considering how the freedom of speech was curbed in the socialist regime.
Tót’s works, however, communicated by not communicating, by saying nothing, and by picturing absence, as expressed in the Nothing, Absent Painting and Blackout Painting series – in direct connection with the Zer0 concept.
The second group of artworks from Endre Tót’s early conceptual period are his Rain pieces.
The raining pattern, created with an economy of visual means by repeatedly hitting the “/” sign on the typewriter, is always accompanied by text, a fertile ground for the intellectual playfulness characteristic of Endre Tót’s approach, which at times manifested in the form of banal tautology, and at other times as (self-)ironic artistic self-expression or humorous political references.
Found pictures – postcards, reproductions of well-known paintings, or images from magazines – comprised the basis of a significant portion of the “Rain” works, in which the artist inserted texts with references to the image or the shape of the rain, in clear connection with visual poetry.
Made in 1971, Endre Tót’s first Joy-piece which was a single sentence in English and Hungarian on a postcard-sized cardboard sheet: “I am glad that I could have this sentence printed.” In the light of the authoritarian control exerted by the socialist regime over any form of publishing, printing and circulating texts,
Tót’s sentence is an ironic expression of the optimism demanded by the state from its citizens.
Tót himself writes the following:
“My ‘Joys’ were the reflections of the totalitarian state of the seventies. I responded with the absurd euphoria of Joys to censorship, isolation, suppression sensed in every field of life, though this suppression worked with the subtlest means, hardly visible.”
The artist’s recognition of the fact that he cannot be held accountable by the authorities for expressing his joy gave rise to further Joy-pieces, the development, universalisation of the topic as well as the Tót’s gradually unfolding actionism, especially the Gladness Demonstrations and the series Very Special Gladnesses, associating image and text.
The artist will be present for the opening and will realise a site-specific piece on the walls of the space. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with acb Gallery, Budapest.
(Róna Kopeczky, Budapest, 2022, translated by Camilla Nielsen)
The Gallery Gabriele Senn presents the exhibition Café del Mar curated by 2022 Maximilian Geymüller featuring works from the artists Plamen Dejanoff, Gina Fischli, Tomasz Kowalski, Lisa Oppenheim, Markéta Othová, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Anastasia Sosunova, Natalia Martynenko
Schleifmühlgasse 1A A-1040 Wien
Tue - Fri: 11.00 am - 6.00 pm
Sat: 11.00 am - 4.00 pm
The exhibition explores borders and their dissolution. It addresses the identity and connectedness of cultural spaces and focuses on the migration of signs and their meanings, their recontextualization/shifting and hybridisation.
Further attention is given to the dividing lines between East and West, Orient and Occident, which are being sharply delineated once again in recent times. These cannot be maintained in full clarity and are made to disappear in the picture.
The symbolic weight of the sunset and sunrise as cultural and political code is juxtaposed with the recurring spectacle of nature as a pictorial correction. In terms of its content, the latter invites the audiences to view things with more openness and to consider the plurality of meaning.
The sun and other motifs are to be understood in their complex semantic breadth, whilst hard electronic sounds coming from the basement of the gallery herald the beginning or end of the party. An exhibition that highlights both literalness and metaphor, high and low, sundowner and destruction. It is a scenario of blurriness on the threshold of darkness. With works by Plamen Dejanoff, Gina Fischli, Tomasz Kowalski, Lisa Oppenheim, Markéta Othová, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Anastasia Sosunova and a DJ set by Natalia Martynenko.
Jean-Frédéric Schnyder (born 1945 in Basel) is at the centre of the exhibition. A consistent focus of his since concept art dominated the 1970s, he has anticyclically developed paintings of everyday scenes.
The exhibition displays ten sunrises at Lake Zug, from a series of 27 paintings in all, each painted between 12 July and 27 December 1996, whenever the sun was visible. Pop as clear and fresh as early-morning air, traditional open-air painting combined with conceptual coolness.
A massive front appears to approach from behind though, a fundamental critique of visual representation: this series of the repeatedly painted reappearing sun is not a parade of the banal, but rather a fanning out of contingency and diminishing significance. Doubts grow as one moves from one picture to the next. Questions arise as to what pictures can mean beyond what is visible.
Affected herself by issues of cultural identity and belonging, Anastasia Sosunova (b. 1993 in Ignalina, Lithuania), a Lithuanian with Russian heritage addresses the aforementioned issues in her video Demikhov-Dog.
The "Demikhov Dog" is named after the Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov, who performed the world's first head transplants in 1954, creating two-headed dogs that actually survived for a short time. She explains that, "The footage used for this piece was collected throughout the Baltic region and was mixed with fictional characters, chimerical animated realities and not entirely Lithuanian stories."
Thus, the wondrous creature becomes an expression of the video's multiple narrative structure as well as a hybrid cultural self-conception that dismisses simplistic understanding that thinks in dichotomies such as East and West.
For more in detail description of the attending artists and their work visit the Gabrielle Senn website.
The Gallery Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman presents “What Can Artists Do Now?" curated by the Artist Project Group: Bernhard Garnicnig, Lukas Heistinger, Andrea Steves, featuring the artists Eglė Budvytytė, Juan Blanco (memeclassworldwide), Mateusz Dworczyk (memeclassworldwide), Bernhard Garnicnig (Artist Project Group), Lukas Heistinger (Artist Project Group), Lucie Kolb, Ramona Kortyka (memeclassworldwide), Jens Van Lathem (Bureau of Analogies/TWIIID), Mary Maggic, Scott William Raby (Bureau of Analogies/f.eks), Tobias Van Royen (Bureau of Analogies/TWIIID), Jennifer Merlyn Scherler (memeclassworldwide), Miriam Simun, Andrea Steves (Artist Project Group), Franz West.
Seilerstätte 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Tue - Fr 13.00 - 19.00 and by appointment
The curatorial collective Artist Project Group (Bernhard Garnicnig, Lukas Heistinger, and Andrea Steves) interrogates phenomena of capitalism through curatorial and artistic methods, in an attempt to build platforms for resilient aesthetic and artistic practices.
In our project for curated_by with Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman and within the framing of Kelet, we continue to investigate the capitalist overproduction of meaning, including the recuperation of crisis phenomena into the market, and ask „What Can Artists Do Now?”
Following the workshop „Artists Have The Answers?“ and the online festival „What Would Artists Do?“, the exhibition integrates recently developed works – developed from the vantage point of the Artist-as- Consultant and/or offered as services – into the context of a fine-art gallery.
The exhibition troubles notions of audience, participant, material, and impact. In presenting what these artists are doing now, the works connect to a multitude of current crises – both acute and wide-ranging – that are inherent in capitalism and continuously producing its resultant conditions and intensifications. The works hook together and present an overall landscape of the present phenomenon and epiphenomenon of capitalism.
The Cybernetics-based model of business consultancy services is one of the most pervasive yet invisible global exports from the incipient Western Cold War information industry. Today, consultative industry continues its expansion into increasingly differentiated services, with its methods and services pervasively influencing decision making processes that govern public life.
In the 90s, artists started to critically affirm their transforming role as service providers to institutions, yet their collective movement towards self-regulating their practice was often sidelined by discourses of critique and politics, putting an end to emancipatory initiatives to improve working conditions of artists.
Artist Project Group is interested in replacing the concept of innovation with practices of maintenance, that is, maintaining practices through crisis by developing projects in which artists extend their performative knowledge practices as services to institutions, organizations and businesses.
Artists are purported to hold an important role in a changing society, yet their expertise is often undervalued, and their practices are rarely integrated with the processes where change happens.
The constant expansion of capitalism continues even through war and crisis, an expansion that doesn’t exist outside of or separate from crisis and war, but rather intensifies through these periods: profiting and strengthening from them, feeding into them with weapons, solutions, technologies; that is, moving and shapeshifting into the gashes opened by war. Part of our position is acknowledging how artists can intervene in these ongoing logics.
Through the included works, which manifest in a range of forms and interventions in institutions, Artist Project Group attempts to sketch the outlines for resilient artist practices. This conceptualization of resilience is broadly applicable, from economic fluctuations to institutional structures within the art market to the critical self-valuation of artists’ work during times of severe crisis.
What Can Artists Do Now? That is, how can artistic practices be maintained, become resilient, or set the conditions for resistance and transformation?
For more information on the artists and the curators head to Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman website.
