Stranded at Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel (3)

In the opening paragraph of his fantastically crazed modernist masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds, Irish writer Flann O’Brien wrote: “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.” Following this logic, this program over four evenings will have four themes, and each evening will be independent from the others. They are all self-contained. Yet their dissimilarity will not hold for long, as they are compelled to inhabit the same space. They will start to interact and dissolve into each other. Animals enter architecture and politics begins to rhyme.

With its ability to envelop our lives, to record time, to become image, and with its ambition to synthesize disciplines, architecture has always fascinated and confounded artists. In the piece by Judith Hopf, architecture is the site of utter despair, while Aglaia Konrad lovingly and calmly records a building. The history, theory, and language of architecture, and the notes of its frozen music, are both fertile sources and useful models for art making. What concerns architecture beyond individual building also concerns artists: landscape, cityscape, and soundscape, synchronicity and diachroneity, lifestyle and Stilfragen, flâneur-ing and permanence. The multifaceted works of Tris Vonna-Michell allow myriad readings. This evening, the focus will be on his relationship with architecture. The ways in which his language and photography-based practice inhabits architectural and urban space.

Program

Aglaia Konrad, Concrete & Samples II Blockhaus, 2009, 10 min
Florian Pumhösl, Programm, 2006, 8 min
Knowles Eddy Knowles, Agora, 2015, 11 min
Yuki Higashino, Poundbury Horror, 2013–2016, 21 min
Judith Hopf, Some End of Things: The Conception of Youth, 2011, 4 min
Tris Vonna-Michell, A Watermark: Capitol Complex, 2015, 7 min
Tris Vonna-Michell, Postscript III-V (Berlin), 2016, 9 min
Tris Vonna-Michell, Register, 2016, 15 min

Curated and presented by Yuki Higashino, guest: Tris Vonna-Michell

Yuki Higashino lives in Vienna. He has recently exhibited at Le BBB centre d’art, Toulouse, Schneiderei, Vienna (2016), Mount Analogue, Stockholm, and Skånes konstförening, Malmö (2014, both with Elisabeth Kihlström). In November 2016 he will present a joint exhibition with Elisabeth Kihlström at Gallery G99, House of Arts, Brno.

Tris Vonna-Michell lives in Stockholm. Exhibitions (selection): Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2015); A story within a story, 8th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2015); VOX, Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2014); Turner Prize 2014, Tate Britain, London (2014).