Dorit Margreiter: Really!

Dorit Margreiter’s artistic interest is motivated by the correlations between visual systems and spatial structures as well as the consequences of these correlations in our daily social lives. At the heart of her explorations lie modern and contemporary architectures and various forms of media representation. For years, Dorit Margreiter has been investigating the relation between history and the present and that between reality, representation, and fiction. In so doing, she pays particular attention to gender roles and to popular and artistic displays. Film has a special place in this endeavor. For her solo exhibition at mumok, Dorit Margreiter has transformed the entire exhibition space in an artistic installation involving display and architectural components, films, mobiles, and photographs.

A central element of the installation is a new filmic work that was shot in a hall of mirrors at Vienna’s Prater amusement park. In this labyrinthine architecture of glass and reflective surfaces our gaze is refracted, deflected, fragmented, multiplied, and distorted. Titled Mirror Maze, Margreiter’s piece traces the differences between the physical and visual foundations of orientation as well as the material, technical, and imaginary determinants of filmic representation, projection, and illusion.

Dorit Margreiter’s filmic approach to the maze’s glass and mirror architecture is based on two projections that form the reference point in the mumok building for the quasi-labyrinthine exhibition architecture. Both the recently made film and other photographic and sculptural works by Margreiter that in some way correlate to the film and will be integrated in the exhibition architecture refer to the concrete place of the show, the museum itself. A mobile consisting of mirror elements engages with the actual exhibition space and the relation between visuality and materiality prevalent in it, as does the collection of photographic tableaus depicting glass in various forms. Other works presented in the labyrinthine architecture are devoted to the specific location—the museum—and its forms of representation. They address the history and readability of architectural fragments and shine a light on the mechanisms of the practice of collecting.

Dorit Margreiter’s years of dealing with spatial structures have been significantly influenced by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s seminal book of architecture theory, Learning from Las Vegas. Another filmic work, entitled Boulevard, on display for the first time in the mumok show, refers to the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, a graveyard of sorts for discarded neon signs. The Neon Museum bundles various references to the aforementioned themes and to Margreiter’s earlier works. Its collection of neon signs, for instance, corresponds to both an existing film installation dealing with neon lettering and her mobiles built from abstracted letters—themselves, without fail, also moving pictures.

Taking her theoretical groundwork and Las Vegas—a place where architecture and illusion, visuality and materiality, paradigmatically interleave—as a point of departure, Margreiter ultimately creates a new arc with this film project to her concrete exhibition at mumok.

Dorit Margreiter (*1967), lives in Vienna.
Exhibitions (selection): Photo Kinetics. Movement, Body & Light in the Collections, Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2017); Tito’s Bunker, Kunstverein Baden Württemberg (2017); New Spaces, Charim Wien (2016); Broken Sequence, Stampa, Basel (2015); Self-Timer Stories, Austrian Cultural Forum New York (2014); Performing Histories (1), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Tomorrow was already here, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012); Description, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2011); Modernologies. Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2010) and MACBA Barcelona (2009); 53rd Venice Biennale, Austrian Pavilion, Venice (2009); Locus Remix: Three Contemporary Positions Part III: Dorit Margreiter, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2009); Poverty Housing. Americus, Georgia, MAK Vienna with Rebecca Baron (2008); analog, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2006); 10104 Angelo View Drive, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2004). Prizes and scholarships (selection): Otto Mauer Prize (2002), Prize of the City of Vi- enna for Visual Art (2003), Blinky Palermo Grant (2004), Austrian Prize for Video and Media Art (2016)

Curator: Matthias Michalka

Exhibition catalogue
ed. by Matthias Michalka, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
Preface: Karola Kraus and Matthias Michalka
Essays by Anette Baldauf, Sabeth Buchmann, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Beatriz Colomina, Rike Frank, Norman Klein, Matthias Michalka Graphic design: Dorit Margreiter, Nina Ober
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2019
English edition:
ISBN (mumok): 978-3-902947-69-7
ISBN (König): 978-3-96098-605-8

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