Speech Acts

This program is based on Hannah Arendt’s paradigm of “action” as the core human activity. For Arendt, action is defined by language, communication, and the exchange of information. It determines social interaction and guides the ways in which people live together. Therefore it is crucial for the political subject and the political community. The mutual relations between language and performance, the constitution of the subject by means of language, and multiperspectivist forms of communication are the backdrop of the works shown in this program. A conscious mixing of artistic strategies and media like video, performance, dialog, or drawing within these works opens up spaces in which complex contexts can be presented or seemingly separate events, times, and logics can be placed in relation to each other. This program is a continuation of the exhibition of the same name that took place during the steirischer herbst 2015 at Forum Stadtpark in Graz.

Program

Elske Rosenfeld, A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures, lecture performance, 2014, c. 30 min
Ricarda Denzer, Schwebendes (from the series Präsenz eines anderen Ortes / Ort einer anderen Präsenz), 2015, 17 min
Michael Baers, Outline of a Model of Influence, staged reading, 2015, c. 30 min
Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: three, 2013, 38 min

Curated and presented by Georgia Holz

Michael Baers is an American artist based in Berlin. His work combines text and drawings. Often but not exclusively he works with sequential graphics. His work spans many topics, linked by a concern with dialogical formats and depth models of research and inquiry. He completed his PhD at AkBild in 2014.

Ricarda Denzer is an artist and has been teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2013. Her most recent works are the art project About the House and the accompanying books Silence Turned Into Objects – W.H. Auden in Kirchstetten (2014) and Perplexities (Revolver Verlag, 2013).

Sharon Hayes's art practice uses multiple mediums—video, performance, and installation—in ongoing investigation into various intersections between history, politics, and speech. Her work is concerned with developing new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political moment, not as a moment without historical foundation but as one that is always allegorical, a moment that reaches simultaneously backwards and forwards. To this aim, she employs conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism. Sharon Hayes lives and works in New York.

Elske Rosenfeld (born 1974, Halle/S.) lives and works in Berlin and Vienna and completed her PhD-in-Practice at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. Her research is on the history of dissidence in Eastern Europe and the events of 1989 and 1990. In her current videos and performances, she investigates the body as the venue and archive of historical events, developing choreographies or interventions into the material abstracted from movements and gestures found in documents.

Georgia Holz is an art historian and works as a freelance curator in Vienna. From 2003–2005 she was curatorial assistant at the Kunsthalle Wien and from 2006–2015 assistant curator at Generali Foundation in Vienna. Her most recent curated exhibitions include Speech Acts. On Speaking as Political Action (2015), I Am Another World: Artistic. Authorship Between Desubjectification and Recanonization (with Claudia Slanar, 2013), and With a name like yours you might be any shape (with Claudia Slanar, 2012).