Heinrich Dunst: sink / on affairs

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is pleased to announce the start of this year's program with two exhibitions that refer to the further development of conceptual art in the present. Austria plays a central role as a starting point, with the context being further explored internationally. Both projects share an interest in the production of objects and the tension between this object and its conceptual, linguistic, philosophical, medial, social or institutional context.

sink
Heinrich Dunst is currently the conceptual artist from Austria. His works have always posed exciting fundamental questions about art: How are works created and what does a contemporary production look like? How are visual art and language connected? The artist plays with different things such as language in the form of individual words or fragments of sentences, objects removed from their everyday context and different visual media. In the process, many lines of connection emerge between these individual levels, which can be used to think differently about the meaning and potential of art. The show aims to make visible strategies of displacement, creating gaps, and changing speed within artistic idioms, in order to weave a rich network of forms that attempts to show how art is created between ideas, language, and objects. The associative spaces that are opened up in this way leave the beholder with a myriad of possible interpretations, even though the artist has set up a formally strict sequence of works. Heinrich Dunst addresses the “migration of forms” including grasping at the objects whose status that can otherwise be so difficult to adequately describe in our media-based ephemeral age, and yet this concerns their so hard-to-achieve contemporary definition as works of art.

on affairs
with Noah Barker, Milena Büsch, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Lorenza Longhi, Vera Lutz, Studio For Propositional Cinema, Sung Tieu

The group exhibition on affairs shows a young generation of artists working internationally, who take up conceptual art in various ways. Text, various strategies of appropriation, media in all their range and a play with the institution itself play the decisive roles. While in classical conceptual art works are reduced to an idea, for the current generation the object and how it is produced is becoming increasingly important. The different variants of contemporary conceptual art that this exhibition brings together display a wide range of ways of addressing how art may be of assistance in better understanding and encountering our own time, as well as finding ways of negotiating it. Post-conceptual follows conceptual without the present-day relevance of its art becoming in any way exhausted in its future. The different ways of isolating and selecting images lead not only to more clarity concerning their own specific qualities, but also their relationship to the object in its fragile diversity, whether in language, poetry, or form. 

Curated by Sandro Droschl and Jan Tappe.

The exhibitions are accompanied by a broad and varied program of events that attempts to further think and communicate the content, using all the institution's channels. A joint publication for the two exhibitions will be published by saxpublishers (Vienna) in spring, which will be completed by two essays by Kolja Reichert and Marina Vishmidt in addition to extensive text and image material.

Program, discourse and art education: halle-fuer-kunst.at

Press inquiries: Helga Droschl