ART-PRESENTATION: Unprecedented Times

For its reopening Kunsthaus Bregenz presents the exhibition “Unprecedented Times”, six significant artists: Helen Cammock, Annette Messager, Rabih Mroué, Markus Schinwald, Marianna Simnett and Ania Soliman are exhibiting works that were created during the corona crisis or beforehand, anticipating the event. The display of works at Kunsthaus Bregenz is a reflection of these unforeseeable and unprecedented times.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthaus Bregenz Archive

The exhibition “Unprecedented Times”, in this specific form is only possible at this specific moment. Sensitive insights into currently existing in isolation and under continual threat. Helen Cammock is a visual poet whose drawings, prints, photographs and films juxtapose word and image. Through her residency she collected the testimonies of activists, migrants and refugees, witnessing the transformation of lament into the expression of survival and resilience. Their stories emerge in a body of new works: a split screen film; a triptych of vinyl cut prints; a group performance and a screen printed frieze that captures the power of women’s voices from the Baroque period to Italy today. From the 1970s onward, Annette Messager’s work has been known for a heterogeneity of form and subject matter, ranging from the personal to the fictional, the social to the universal. Through an embrace of everyday materials, and principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical display, her diverse media has included construction, documents, language, objects,  taxidermy,  drawings,  photographs, fabric, embroidery, image collections, albums, sculpture and installation. Messager has explored fairy tales, mythology and doppelgangers throughout her œuvre. Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager’s wide range of hybrid forms has had an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, the phantasmagoric. Rabih Mroué s an artist, actor and director who lives in Berlin and whose work merges visual art, performance, and theatre. Blending reality and fiction in his work, Mroué uses found documents, video footage, photographs, and objects to compromise the authority of archival evidence. He is a co-founder and board member of the Beirut Art Center (BAC), a contributing editor to TDR: The Drama Review (NYC), and an associate director at the Münchner Kammerspiele. In his interdisciplinary work, encompassing video, performance, dance, theatre, painting, photography, installation, and even puppetry, Markus Schinwald creates mysterious and unsettling atmospheres that hint at their Viennese production context, through references to austere Biedermeier style or to psychoanalysis. His seminal studies in fashion left him with a wide interest in clothing and, furthermore, in the human body’s potential and limitations in both physical and psychological senses. Therefore, his works concentrate on processes of manipulation and alteration of bodies and their surroundings, echoing the transformative potential of cultural construct. He declares himself a “builder of prostheses for undefined cases” and alters 19th-Century portraits, for instance, by painting improbable apparatus on the characters’ faces and bodies, such as little bandages, splinters or wires that seem to tie the limbs of their owners together. Marianna Simnett has gained global attention for her visceral and theatrical works, which draw upon conventions of storytelling and folklore to explore the body as a site of transition. Often featuring the artist performing alongside a cast of non-actors, Simnett’s work speaks to the relationships we develop with our bodies—shifting between control and violence, phobia, and dysmorphia—as they undergo intervention and transformation. In the “Blood In My Milk” an epic 73 minute, five-channel video installation, involving a motley cast of insects, children, surgeons, and the artist herself, who perform anxieties surrounding the body. In this disorientating musical tale, Simnett’s characters are subjected to threats, invasive procedures, and paranoiac visions which explode into hallucinatory realms. Ania Soliman makes large scale drawings based on digitized imagery and archival material, while also working with text, performance, video and installation. Her research-based practice focuses on relationships, both real and imaginary, between nature and technology. Through processes of tracing, desaturating, smudging, coloring, and embellishing, she transforms source materials into layered drawings that often repeat a motif as they represent the process of conflicting ideas working themselves out. Her works function as icons for unconscious negotiations.

Info: Curator: Thomas D. Trummer, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Karl-Tizian-Platz, Bregenz, Duration: 5/6-30/8/20, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at