OTHER THAN YOURSELF–An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space
February 8 – September 21, 2008
Himmelpfortgasse 13, 2nd floor, 1010 Vienna
T +43 1 513 98 56 29
F +43 1 513 98 56 22
press [at] TBA21.org
A group exhibition with works by Janet Cardiff, Maurizio Cattelan, Emanuel Danesch / David Rych, Mario García Torres, Amos Gitai, Jenny Holzer, Dennis Hopper, Jonathan Horowitz, Sanja Ivekovic, Amar Kanwar, David Lamelas, Ján Mancuska, Paul McCarthy, Boris Ondreicka, Sergio Prego, Pipilotti Rist, Hans Schabus, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Monika Sosnowska, Salla Tykkä, Slaven Tolj >
Other than Yourself–An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space presents a range of works, mostly drawn from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary collection, that reference either the immediate space that surrounds or serves the artists’ actions and experimentation or the space that unfolds through the artworks. These particular spaces allow for an examination of how various spatial orders are constructed along a shifting scale from intimate (body), to private (home), to interpersonal (social), to material/institutional (economic, political, cultural)—all based on an interdependent notion of the self.
The personal space provides us with a location in the world, by marking a barrier that distinguishes and can protect the individual from the outside. Privacy can represent a disengagement from others, a nonrelatedness, but also rests upon the paradox that this space is provided by the recognition of others (audience, viewer). It is part of a person’s repertoire of communicative measures that have the potential of expressing and protecting an individual’s personal boundaries. It marks a flexible potential space that allows for the creation of shared realities—that belong neither to the self nor to the other. Space in this context is understood as practice: the meanings that are attached to places and the spatial order are not fixed or invariable but are invoked in the context of user/usage and language.
Other than Yourself–An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space deals very extensively with the issue of spaces and the negotiations of being within them. It opens a discursive field in which artworks enlarge the perception of privacy and/or intimacy, negotiating the more subtle and contradictory layers of these ideas. The exhibition introduces and juxtaposes diverse ways of using, unfolding or dealing with privacy/intimacy by contextualizing and addressing parameters such as specific times, sites, events and topics, thereby retracing an open and fragmented history of the private/intimate and its multilayered shifts in recent artistic practice.
Amar Kanwar’s The Lightning Testimonies, co-commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and presented at documenta 12 is installed in the project gallery in the courtyard. In the 8-channel video installation the gendered (private) space of violence becomes a space of public appearance, as a group of women disrobe in an act of public protest and lastingly alter the symbolic realm of social representation. Kanwar illustrates a process leading from embodiment of traditional roles and assigned scripts as wives, mothers, and victims to the emergence of transformative subjects in spite of the threat posed by their action.
The publication Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space with contributions by Peio Aguirre, Aristide Antonas, Eric de Bruyn, Adam Budak, Janet Cardiff/Mirjam Schaub, Beatriz Colomina, Gabrielle Cram, Vít Havránek, Amar Kanwar, Soraya Rodríguez, Ralph Rugoff, Andreas Spiegl, Gregory Volk, Daniela Zyman, a.o.
ISBN 978-3-86560-423-1 Book orders: verlag@buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de
Opening: Thursday, February 7, at 7:00 pm
Press conference: Thursday, February 7, at 11:00 am
Lecture: Amar Kanwar The Lightning Testimonies
Wednesday, February 6, at 6:00 pm
February 8 – September 21, 2008
Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 12:00 noon – 6:00 pm
(In July and August the exhibition is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.)
This exhibition is realized with generous support of
