Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl: Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts

Curator Karola Kraus, director of mumok Vienna, is presenting Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl in the Austrian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, two artists whose works are characterised by numerous links between art, performance, design, fashion, performance, sociocultural phenomena, and architecture, thus focusing on current discourses of global relevance. 

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl develop stage-like installations, titled Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts, in which they unfurl their entire artistic cosmos—from paintings, sculptures, textile works, photographs, text, and video to a fashion collection and a special magazine. These hybrid “spaces of desire” upset conventional notions of museum presentations and shake up the hierarchies of art and design, of high and low. The artists deal with the mechanisms of identity construction, in which desire and sensory experience play a major role. They construct multilayered dynamic spaces, in which the viewers themselves become actors and may expand their horizon through curiosity. 

From dandy to camp to bohemian and counterculture, from flamboyantly staging the self to being the solitary, introverted romantic: At least since the invention of modernism, artists have had a role to play within the operating system of art. These social role allocations are always also attached to gender, sexual orientation, skin colour, and status. Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl have set up their stage within the coordinate system of this construct that employs desired as well as forced identities, undermining it—and rehearsing their own play by mixing up systems and producing hybrids that deal with the identities of styles, media, materiality, contexts, aesthetics, and movements throughout the history of art and design. Instead of indoctrinating their audience, the artists want a human exchange at eye level: a joyous sensory invitation to join them in their journey to utopian spheres, thus making alternatives imaginable. 

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl focus on the structural conditions of the Austrian Pavilion’s symmetrical architecture, which is both divided and connected by a colonnade. Each of the two main spaces bears the mark of one of the two artists. While the two individual positions remain distinct, they are also in conversation with each other. Thus the various materials, modes of operation, symbols, and forms appear to oscillate between the two presentations and are duplicated and mirrored. The side pavilions earmark the artist duo by way of a reflecting illusionist spatial situation. 

Jakob Lena Knebl’s expansive installation elude clear-cut classifications. It displays the artist’s current interrogation of the 1970s, especially the sociopolitical issues and the history of art and design of that decade, and reflects their potent influence on the present day. Key aspects in this context include identity and the possibilities of its transformation, the places of its staging, and the question of co-producers and mechanisms of exclusion. The scenography of Knebl’s work in the pavilion is dominated by opulence. - Ashley Hans Scheirl’s installation is a walk-in self-portrait as a painter. A red velvet curtain is pushed aside by the artist’s painted hand. As in a theatre proscenium, we see a staggered arrangement of flat pieces of scenery that at the same time make up the layers of this fold-out painting. As we enter, two different-sized eyes regard us from the rearmost wall with an ambivalent emotional expression. 

The two artists’ joint installation is characterised by a dynamic juxtaposition and intertwining of different, seemingly paradoxical spaces, styles and pictogramme-like symbols that all seek to garner the visitors’ attention with their own particular devices. The visitors, in turn, become protagonists in this piece, setting the scenery in motion with their bodies. 

Contact: info@biennalekneblscheirl.at

Press: kl@luz-communication.de