Lazar Lyutakov / Delaine Le Bas / Chen Chieh-jen

Lazar Lyutakov: 1 Million Random Numbers
Many of Lazar Lyutakov’s works appropriate ordinary articles of our modern mass culture and simple industrial products in an effort to analyze contemporary conditions of production and forms of consumption, flows of capital and commodities, and aesthetic mass phenomena and to reflect on values, productivity, quality, and utility in a post-capitalist industrialized world.

In 1 Million Random Numbers, the new installation he has developed for the Secession, Lyutakov arranges over a hundred different lava lamps on wire mesh structures and stands from a laboratory supplier. The arresting play of lights and colors is constantly changing, lending the exhibition a different cast at each instant and endowing it with an ephemeral quality. Lyutakov then combines the spectacular character of this mise-en-scène with a presentation derived from the real use of lava lamps in information technology. The fact, that it has been used since the mid-1990s as a random generator in internet encryption, was an important aspect that inspired Lyutakov to choose the lava lamp. The aesthetic references and historical and political narratives range from the counterculture of the 1960s across New Age spirituality to the technological utopia of Silicon Valley and the digital capitalism associated with it. Far from resolving the tensions that result from the confrontation between all these layers of meaning, Lyutakov precisely articulates them and systematically keeps them in suspense.

Lazar Lyutakov was born in Shabla, Bulgaria, in 1977 and lives and works in Vienna.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession
Curated by Annette Südbeck

Delaine Le Bas: Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins the New Life / A New Life Is Beginning
Delaine Le Bas combines visual, performative and literary practices to create a transdisciplinary artistic oeuvre that encompasses all areas of life. In her works she deals with political as well as private and emotional facets, which involve belonging to the Rom*nja people, their history and rich cultural heritage. Le Bas uses “classical” forms and techniques, especially textile techniques such as embroidery and appliqué, which, together with large-flowered fabrics and fantastic imagery, are immediately associated with clichés whilst she subverts her own decorative aesthetic by openly exploring her struggles, thus defying stereotypical limitations.

In exhibitions, she stages spaces and creates moods; works and artifacts merge into an overall image. Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins the New Life / A New Life Is Beginning at Secession is no exception to this: The eponymous installation is a total work of art composed of paintings, sculptures, architecture, writing, performance, sound, light, and fabrics that extends through all three gallery rooms.

In her feminist practice, she has long been preoccupied with extraordinary female figures such as goddesses, visionaries, and witches. Little wonder, then, that Klimt’s mythological visual language in the Beethoven Frieze, and especially the demonized female figures such as the Gorgons, drew her interest. For Le Bas, this work grew out of the experience of a personal loss: the death of her grandmother, whom she felt most attached to and her stalwart supporter. Incipit Nova Vita is about a caesura, a fresh start. In grappling with this subject, Le Bas is attentive to its subtle nuances, as the second part of the title suggests: Here Begins the New Life / A New Life Is Beginning.

Delaine Le Bas was born in Worthing, United Kingdom, in 1965 and lives and works in Worthing.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession.
Curated by Bettina Spörr.

Chen Chieh-jen: Worn Away
A long-time denizen of Taiwan’s art world, Chen Chieh-jen’s work from the 1980s to the present has been exhibited internationally. In his multifaceted work, the artist inquires into forms of colonisation, mechanisms of marginalisation, labour exploitation, and the multifarious blatant and covert forms of state control. Engaging in community-making, Chen’s work probes forms of collective resistance, as much as it scrutinizes Taiwan’s entanglements in a globalised world order under the auspices of neoliberalism.

In his most recent film Worn Away (2022–23), Chen paints a dystopian picture of a society living and suffering under the neoliberal regime of multinational corporations in a so-called “Corporatocracy”: A globally operating “Empire” controls the Internet and thus sets the tone in propagating meritocracy as a universal model. The system has the interpretational sovereignty over the genuineness or falseness of information and thus the mechanisms for manipulating the masses in its hands. While the distribution of wealth and well-being becomes more and more unequal, surveillance technologies and control mechanisms are omnipresent, resulting in an increasing number of people who are unemployed, mentally ill, uncreditworthy, or who dissent from mainstream opinion face exclusion from society. Deprived of their human dignity and against the backdrop of their impending social extinction, they turn to the so-called “Optimization of Biological Function Assistance Program” run by the ruling companies and are henceforth considered nothing more than “material” for scientific experiments.

As producer, he demonstrates alternative patterns of action and narratives vis-à-vis the neoliberal devaluation, exploitation and dehumanization prevalent in the film, for example when he deliberately casts otherwise marginalized groups of people in roles, giving them a voice and visibility. Chen is well aware of the illusionistic power of images and thus also of his responsibility as a filmmaker.

Chen Chieh-jen, born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan. Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession
Curated by Jeanette Pacher

Publications
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications. The digital publications are available for free here.

Opening program
Opening and garden party: Thursday, June 29, 2023, 7pm
Exhibition talk: Lazar Lyutakov in conversation with Luca Lo Pinto, an event by the Friends of the Secession, Thursday, June 29, 2023, 6pm
Performance: Delaine Le Bas, Hera Santos, and Lincoln Cato, Thursday, June 29, 2023, 7:45pm

Press contact
Julia Kronberger, presse@secession.at
Press preview: Thursday, June 29, 2023, 10am
Press materials: secession.at/presse