Ines Doujak: Geistervölker

Curators: What, How and for Whom / WHW
Assistant curator: Aziza Harmel

With Geistervölker, meaning “ghost populations,” Kunsthalle Wien presents a comprehensive solo exhibition of Austrian artist Ines Doujak (b. 1959, lives and works in Vienna), revolving around histories of pandemics, transmission of viruses, and their relation to global trade and to the current economic, microbiological, and ecological crises. The artist traces in fragments the origins of pandemics throughout history and links them to a global economy that is based on logics of extraction facilitated by colonial legal mechanisms and late capitalism.

Since the 1990s, Doujak has been developing a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses photography, performance, film, and installation and uses political theory as well as natural and artist-created objects—sculpture in the broadest sense—to deconstruct the political implications of sexist and racist stereotypes. Her meticulous research and her strong storytelling ability allow her the prowess to use both science and the grotesque to denounce exploitative structures and inequalities in society.

This exhibition is both a continuation and a newly visualized manifestation of her work as an artist as well as an archivist, a researcher, and collector. In Geistervölker, the artist combines both new and old projects to create a constellation of works that conceptualize the constant and absurd movement between accumulation of capital and the impossibility to continue extracting from the Earth because it has reached the limit of what we greedily and continuously take. The textiles, videos, papier-mâché sculptures and installations on display form a narrative linking global chains of economic production, consumption, and exploitations and the present pandemics, as well as the recurrent patterns that cause and spread pandemics historically.

Long before the COVID-19 crisis, Doujak has been looking into ill human bodies in relation to the flora and fauna of the natural world to which they belong and the pending threat of pandemic illnesses. The exhibition takes the title of her iconic work Ghost Populations (2016–ongoing), a series of collages made from images collected from nineteenth-century medical atlases on skin diseases. These assembled elements from drawings of diseased bodies are also used to conceive her present generation of sculptures. There is something novel and disjointed about these bodies, something productively different from what they once were: they move away from the notion of illness toward liberating expansion, heroic disregard, and joyful protest against standards that set the limit of sickness and health to sustain system functionality and discipline.

Geistervölker will be accompanied by a series of live performances centering around Transmission: A series of five Podcasts on Disease and Pandemics in a Distorted World (2021). In these five polyphonic podcasts, Ines Doujak and John Barker follow pandemics and disease throughout the centuries, artfully addressing timely topics like factory farming, healthcare speculation, and the relationship between the spread of disease and the development of new trade routes featuring the World Traveler and Rat, the Scapegoat. Every October Tuesday at 5pm, visitors of Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier will be invited to join a collective listening of a new podcast episode. The Transmission podcast will be also made available through Kunsthalle Wien’s website.

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Press contact: Katharina Schniebs / T +43 1 521 89 221 / presse@kunsthallewien.at