Anthea Hamilton / Anne Speier / James Richards & Leslie Thornton: Crossing

Anthea Hamilton
Anthea Hamilton’s interdisciplinary interest in performance is evident in her sculptural assemblages and installations whose tableau-like quality makes them reminiscent of stage sceneries or film sets, and which she has referred to as “performative spaces.” Her sculptures, idiosyncratic constructions precariously balanced between emergence and collapse, function like props for stories that remain to be told.

Hamilton’s work grows out of wide-ranging research, whether she explores strands in cultural history such as the roots of 1970s disco, art-historical references like Art Nouveau, Italian furniture design or ancient Japanese theatre, documentary photography or lichen. Each subject is studied closely and used as a lens through which to understand the world.

For her first solo exhibition in Austria, in Secession’s iconic gallery space, Turner Prize nominee (2016) Anthea Hamilton has developed an immersive installation. The artist occupies the space by covering it with an all-over pattern, turns it into her own, in which she will present a number of individual sculptures and which will have a striking effect on how the space is perceived.

Anthea Hamilton, born in 1978 in London, lives and works in London.
An artist book is published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Curator: Jeanette Pacher

Anne Speier
Many of Anne Speier’s works document the distensions and deformations that objects and figures undergo in order both to understand the limitations of the meaning and agency ascribed to them and to transcend them. Yet the artist also subjects the media she works with to such stretching. Aesthetic qualities are one way to defy certain expectations; absurdity is another.

In her solo exhibition in the Secession’s sublevel gallery, Speier intertwines painting and sculpture in a kind of utopian architecture, short-circuiting its spatial premises with its metaphorical purport. The point of departure is an empty space rendered in a series of industrially manufactured silkscreen prints on various media in colors determined by an algorithm. These elements serve to furnish the existing underground space with architectural components: exterior façades that address persistent stereotypes; niches in which scenes from a school production play out; roofs and additional basements. Such subterranean or otherwise leftover spaces, after all, are often where subcultures and movements form. The middle of the room, the central and representative scene of the exhibiting institution, remains as a figurative blank space.

The exhibition examines the challenge that teachers and students at art schools face along images and installations that limn psycho-emotional topographies. They counter the distrust of art education and the associated hierarchical understanding of aesthetic phenomena with an ambivalent desire for the responsibility that is needed for analyzing the objects in one’s environment and making something new out of them.

Anne Speier, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1977, currently lives in Vienna.
An artist book is published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Curator: Bettina Spörr

James Richards & Leslie Thornton, Crossing
James Richards and Leslie Thornton are showing their first collaborative project Crossing (2016) at the Secession. This video installation materializes an intense phase of exchange between the artists, both enabled and limited by exchanging footage via online sharing platforms. Thornton, a media artist who herself was influenced by Paul Sharits, Yvonne Rainer, and Joan Jonas often deploys projections complicated by ample sound-image interactions. Likewise, musical composition is key to Richard’s practice. Belonging to two distinct artist generations and contexts, both artists’ work is motivated by their understanding of cinema and video as original languages and forms of thinking.

The work’s title evokes the artists’ mode of working together, traversing their practices and sharing their views. Equally, it alludes to CROSSROADS (1976), a short film by Bruce Conner that reworks footage of the U.S. 1946 nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll. Conner confronts the viewer with slow-motion imagery which is at times out of sync with a soundtrack composed by experimental music pioneers. Similarly, the strictly organized frame of Richard and Thornton’s video allows the artists to juxtapose, modulate, and iterate recurring image fragments and sonic impulses. Assembled from both found material and original footage from their own extensive archives, Crossing moves through multiple stages and eventually morphs into an audiovisual note on artistic production and collaboration.

Leslie Thornton, born in 1951 in Knoxville (Tennessee), lives and works in New York.
James Richards, born in 1983, is a British artist who lives in Berlin and London.
An artist book is published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Curator: Annette Südbeck

The exhibition program is conceived by the board of the Secession.