Designs for the Real World
with Azra Aksamija, Marjetica Potrc, Florian Pumhösl, Krzysztof Wodiczko
September 13 trough December 22, 2002
Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15
1040 Vienna
foundation.generali.at
Azra Aksamija, Arizona Road, 2001/02, courtesy the artist
Designs for the Real World
with Azra Aksamija, Marjetica Potrc, Florian Pumhösl, Krzysztof Wodiczko
This exhibition will present selected projects by four artists who explore the design of our living environment and stand out for their interdisciplinary approach. Each in their own way, the various projects will address utopian or ecological design, design for the Third World, social engineering, urban development, urban areas of conflict, and the question of the responsibility of art in a new genre public art.
Azra Aksamija (Austrian architect, born in Bosnia in 1976) has developed a project focusing on the creation and analysis of a new urban structure. With its ethnically mixed population, the Arizona Market, the largest black-market in Bosnia, established in 1997 by American SFOR troops, provides an ideal object for examination. Aksamija considers the self-regulation carried out by the residents of this center for merchandise of all kinds as a positive phenomenon. Prototypes of the interventions proposed by the artist a provocateur pole with all necessary connections for electricity, water and sewerage, and a place holder in the form of a sports groundwill be constructed for the exhibition. A splitscreen projection featuring visual and acoustic impressions of the market, and a timetable of the historical, political and social situation serve to round off the picture that Aksamija presents of the Arizona Market.
Marjetica Potrc (born in 1953 in Slovenia) follows a related approach with her reconstruction of urban structures in suburbs or slums, mainly in the Third World. The artist explores the buildings that are erected around core unitssimple docking places for basic suppliesand reconstructs them in the exhibition area. For the exhibition at the Generali Foundation, she will reconstruct a building by the American architect Samuel Mockbee (19442001) and his Rural Studio. Mockbee’s aim is to develop innovative housing designs for poor people in the south of America. The special feature of the Butterfly-House is its striking aliform roof, which is used to harvest rainwater. Shanty towns, gated communities, mobile architecture are the focus of Potrc’s photographic series. The third part of her presentation in Vienna is a display of innovative design, among other things for the Third World, as a ready-made
Florian Pumhösl’s (born in Vienna in 1971) projects allow viewers to experience the fascination for the esthetics and rhetoric of modernism and the renewal movements that followed it, combined with critical analysis and objective examination. The work shown at the exhibition, on or off earth, 1996, makes visible the basic structures of the artist’s esthetic approach. The model-like reconstruction of designs by Victor Papanek, including some from his book Designs for the Real World, the use of publications and texts to contextualize them within historical discourses, and the critical commentaries by the artist himself combine to form an overall scenario that allows an interrogation of the utopian concepts behind the alternative movement in the sixties.
The politics of the absurd of 1970s Poland were probably the force behind the development of the first Vehicles by Krzysztof Wodiczko (born in 1943 in Poland, lives in the USA). The Vehicle, 1972, for example, was pushed forward by the artist’s own back and forth walking motion. In the late eighties, Wodiczko developed these vehicles further, this time taking into account capitalistic reality, to create a series of Homeless Vehicles. They provide this social group with a street tool that responds to basic necessities of survival economy such as living, sleeping and washing, as well as collecting and reselling cans and bottles. The artist’s intention to give marginalized groups the power of public presence and speech is manifested in design projects like Alien Staffa communications aid for migrants, as well as in his latest public projections. In The Tijuana Projection, 2001, harsh personal experiences of the woman population of the border city of Tijuana were projected live in audio-visual form onto the monumental dome of El Centro Cultural building. Krzysztof Wodiczko is the head of the Interrogative Design Group at the Center of Advanced Visual Studies and the Director of Visual Arts Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
In the sixties Victor Papanek set new design standards with his Tin-Can Radio, which can be used anywhere, independent of any electricity supply. Over and above any esthetic issues, he put ecology, economy and sustainability at the forefront of the design process. The artists’ projects for this exhibition explore the social, political and economic living conditions within their specific frame of reference, and develop approaches to a new design for the real world.
There will be a publication to accompany the exhibition (German/English)
For further information please go to: foundation.gene rali.at/index_e.htm
Press office: Susanne Buder (+43 1) 504 98 80 ext. 24, found.presse@generali.at
Artistic and Managing Director: Dr. Sabine Breitwieser
