At the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009
Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter and Lois & Franziska Weinberger
The three artistic positions choosen by Austrian Commissioners VALIE EXPORT and Silvia Eiblmayr for Venice Biennale 2009 will turn the Austrian pavilion into a fluctuating model space through which it is possible to experience how art is organized.
EXPORT and Eiblmayr, designated by Austrian Minister of Education, Art and Culture, Claudia Schmied, are putting together a multilayered, medially sophisticated presentation for 2009 that will shift the Austrian pavilion into the center of international attention.
Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter, and Lois & Franziska Weinberger all have oeuvres that represent a specific thematic approach and a highly distinctive artistic confrontation with extreme relevance in contemporary art and performance. The common presentation of these four internationally recognized and prominent Austrian artists will bring a fascinating discursive diversity to the context of the Biennale and at the same time, a concise mise-en-scène that includes the pavilion itself as a medium of reflection.
Despite all of the differences in their forms of expression and the media they employ, Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter, and Lois & Franziska Weinberger share a structured way of thinking that asks critical questions of the arrangements that determine social life, its aesthetics, culture, and politics. In this sense, the pavilion will become a place where the works produced especially for it enter into relationships with one another, in dialogue and dialectically. Their conception and the associated division of the pavilion’s space for Krystufek, Margreiter, and L. & F. Weinberger take these ideas into account, namely, the realization of space-oriented installations in the two large interior spaces as well as one outside.
Elke Krystufek is a trained painter, who in her performative, spatial scenarios works equally with drawing, writing, photography, sculpture, and video, whereby she usually makes her own person the main character. Her artistic confrontation deals, in the broadest sense, with the global, medial, mass cultural, consuming space in which Krystufek emphatically also includes the institutional field of art. She was born in 1970 and lives and works in Vienna.
Dorit Margreiter takes up specific terms and processes from both the areas of design and architecture as well as the film and TV genres, to use their content as well as formal components for her analysis and description of everyday life. From these culturally critical aspects, she examines the diverse expressions of the urban space and its transformations in the course of the actual all-encompassing mediatization and commercialization. Margreiter was born 1968, she lives and works in Vienna.
Lois & Franziska Weinberger are concerned in their confrontation with the relationship of “nature” and “culture” with the “fringes of perception.” In their analytical and likewise experimental-poetic works, Lois & Franziska Weinberger track down a “nature” that has always been culturally coded, for which they find/invent diverse forms of expression and medial manifestations: as archive, as writing, as laboratory product, as an object that has been found and processed, as quote, as built space, or as a special biotope.
Lois and Franziska Weinberger were born in 1947 and 1953; they live and work in Vienna and in Gars am Kamp (Lower Austria).
VALIE EXPORT
Media artist, performance artist, filmmaker, based in Vienna.
Silvia Eiblmayr
Art historian, curator, director of Galerie im Taxispalais; based in Innsbruck and Vienna.
Vienna, October 2009
Elke Krystufek www.meyerkainer.com
Dorit Margreiter www.doritmargreiter.net www.krobathwimmer.at
Lois & Franziska Weinberger www.loisweinberger.net www.martinjanda.at
Media Relations Austrian Pavilion 2009:
Goldmann Public Relations. Pauline Gondolf, Zimmerstraße 11, 10969 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 259 357 12, Fax: +49 30 259 357 29, pgondolf [at] goldmannpr.de