Alexander Vaindorf
Fallen Out of the Cold
Jan 17, 2006-Feb 03, 2006
opening: Friday, Jan 13, 2006, 7 p.m.
artists talk: Sat, Jan 14, 2006, 11 a.m.
Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen
Weiherburggasse 13
6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Phone: 43-512-27872710
E-mail: office@buchsenhausen.at
buchsenhausen.at
Fallen Out of the Cold
an exhibition in the framework of the research project Private Investigations Research, Acquisition and Processing of Knowledge in Contemporary Art Practices
Innsbruck, Nov 2005 Feb 2006, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Stadtturmgalerie, Kunstpavillon
Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen is pleased to announce Alexander Vaindorfs Fallen Out of the Cold, the first solo exhibition of the Swedish artist and filmmaker in Austria. The exhibition presents two new video installations and a recent video work related to the topics of the research project Private Investigations – Research, Acquisition and Processing of Knowledge in Contemporary Art Practices.
Alexander Vaindorfs recent works derive their material from extensive fieldwork the artist has done among marginalised groups in and from the Ukraine at places they share in common. Within the relation to vast collectively shared topics – illegal immigration followed by losses of initial context, issues of double identity and the occurrence of parallel, informal economies / closed communities – Vaindorf concentrates his work on individuals who involuntarily became a part of these processes. At the same time the videos grasp a time fragment in the current history of the Unified Europe where considerable numbers of people are not only excluded, but, as the artist insists, also subject to a contemporary form of slavery.
Ukrainian work migrants at their Sunday meeting point in the Parco di Resistenza in Rome; children born in the Chernobyl area in the year of the accident, now facing memories and reality forced upon them as they gather in a sanatorium; people at a hospital undergoing special therapy sessions in order to eliminate the mental after-effects of a prior participation in mass hypnosis through the use of documentary stylistic devices and the de-construction of media storytelling formats into parallel screened narratives Vaindorf drafts a socio-cognitive status report of the present whose relevancy reaches well beyond the borders of the zone observed.
The exhibition is supported by the Tyrolean Government, the City of Innsbruck, the Austrian Federal Chancellery (Arts Division), IASPIS and the Swedish Embassy in Vienna.
Alexander Vaindorf (*1965 in Odessa); MFA at Columbia University, Visual Arts, New York. Recent awards, screenings and exhibitions: NIFCA residency award in Belgrade (2005); 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2005); 51st Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2005); Venice Architecture Biennale, Russian pavilion (2004); B-fact: Tirana and Istanbul Biennale (2003); ‘It is hard to touch the real’, Kunstverein Munich (2003). Teaching and lectures: Trondheim University, Norway (2005); Royal School of Architecture, Stockholm (2002-03). He lives and works in Stockholm. www.alexandervaindorf.com
Private Investigations is a research project on contemporary art practices that make use of various individual (non-scientific) research methods and strategies in order to acquire information and to process it to knowledge bases, which may then be used as the material of the artistic work itself. The project is structured as a series of residencies, exhibitions and symposia, screenings and presentations, held at different locations in Central and South-Eastern Europe over the next two years. Private Investigations has been initiated by Andrei Siclodi, curator at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.
As a point of departure, the project in Innsbruck presents and discusses works by former fellows of the international residency programme for visual and media arts from the past three years. The artists and theorists invited deal in various ways with particular strategies and forms of artistic research into topics such as the spreading of cultural patterns (Memetics), collaborative artistic production and generative software, serial architecture and its influence on human behaviour, the idiomatic behaviour of an artists community in a context of transition, the social and psychological changes within society by examining notions of female identity, models of language and image perception through cinematographic and computerised knowledge acquisition and organisation, and fieldwork as an artistic practice. In addition, the project examines the research and production conditions in the post-academic context of the Jan van Eyck Academie (www.janvaneyck.nl).
Participants in the project are BAVO, Judith Fischer & Claudia Hardi, Geoffrey Garrison, Catalin Gheorghe, Natascha Hagenbeek, Kristina Inciuraite, ixi software, Meta Haven Research Group, Hinrich Sachs, Urtica Art and Media Research Group, Alexander Vaindorf, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor and Stevan Vukovic.
Curators: Andrei Siclodi and Ingeborg Erhart
Actual information on all exhibitions and project presentations at buchsenhausen.at
