June 9, 2022, 5pm
The Kontakt Collection and its research-based work focus on Central, Eastern and Southeastern European artistic activity that has accompanied the social and political developments of the past several decades and has been contributing significant neo-avant-garde works to art history ever since the late 1950s. Numerous artists and protagonists of the intelligentsia bore witness to these countries’ various transformative processes, which were mediated via art around the key years of 1968 and 1989. Their testimonies scrutinize these processes’ influence and their effects on the status of contemporary art.
The Kontakt Video Portraits continue the tradition of art-historically important Austrian art projects. The starting point for this endeavor was provided by the “portraits of artists” curated by Peter Kogler for the “museum in progress,” which offered an impressive panorama of international artistic perspectives from the 1990s, as well as by Wilhelm Gaube’s oeuvre of around 250 artist portraits from the 1960s and 1970s.
For the Kontakt Video Portraits, publicist and dramaturge Claus Philipp and artist Manuel Gorkiewicz were commissioned to conduct and record conversations with Central and Eastern European artists and intellectuals who have contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the artistic and social milieus, realities, and developments in this geographic cultural sphere.
15 video portraits have since been completed and will be presented to the public today at the cinema Admiral Kino in Vienna. Ten of these will be available on the Kontakt homepage starting this summer. The series will be continuously expanded with new contributions.
So far, interviews with the following figures have been completed: Edek Bartz, Josef Dabernig, Katrina Daschner, Silvia Eiblmayr, Sanja Iveković, Anna Jermolaewa, Peter Kubelka, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Franz Schuh, Clemens Setz, Goran Trbuljak, What, How & for Whom / WHW, Werner Würtinger, and Želimir Žilnik.
