In Search of an Alternative

Looking for alternative artistic solutions, the participating artists of the project address the problem of continuity in contemporary Russian art. The works of Nadezhda Busheneva, Alina Gutkina, Kirill Gluschenko and Arseny Zhilyaev vividly reflect the trends of the most recent years – the period of the stabilisation of political processes in post-Soviet Russia.

Speaking of the distinctive nature of the participants’ aesthetic language, it must be noted that Busheneva deals with historical memory through metaphors of Soviet industrial buildings, which contain the visual potential of a totalitarian state. Zhilyaev turns to Soviet history as well, maintaining that the subject of a classless society remains relevant today, even though it was discredited by the controversial Stalinist interpretation of it. Gutkina studies the generational psychology and behaviour, examining the case of the generation that was born in the 1990s and currently tries to make sense of the changes taking place in the post-Soviet era. Gluschenko employs a similar approach in his attempt to recall and archive the social reality that his generation had gotten a taste of, and which ceased to exist, yet remained aesthetically relevant.

Joseph Backstein

Born in Moscow in 1945, lives and works in Moscow

Joseph Backstein is the Commissioner of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow. He holds a PhD in Sociology of Art and Culture from the Institute of Sociology at the USSR Academy of Sciences. His achievements have brought him numerous awards such as an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University, Sweden. In 2008, he was a member of the dOCUMENTA (13) selection committee nominating the curators. Backstein has been a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts since 2007 and a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) since 1995.

Galerie Grita Insam

An der Hülben 3 / Seilerstätte, 1010 Vienna
www.galeriegritainsam.at
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Communism never happened

Named after the title of a picture by Ciprian Muresan, the exhibition presents a selection of works by internationally renowned Romanian artists from the contemporary scene from after the change of the country’s regime. The works relate to the provocatively revisionist trend of societies rewriting history in terms of partisan interests. Confronted with the Communist past of their country, the artists deal with the shadows of the dictatorship, with its avatars and clichés, its hazards and absurdities, its lifestyle, Kafkaesque atmosphere, and permanent lies. As if to get rid of the past forever, they challenge subsequent generations to participate in a journey across this forty-year wasteland via their works.

Ami Barak

Born in Romania in 1952, lives and works in Paris

Ami Barak is an independent curator and art critic who has curated numerous international exhibitions like House Trip for Art Forum Berlin 2007; Can Art Do More? in the Jerusalem Foundation, 2008; Re-construction for the Young Artists’ Biennial in Bucharest 2008; and Elixirs of Panacea in the Palais Benedictine, Fecamp 2010. His recent project was Art for the World. The (Expo) City of Forking Paths at the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010. He was commissioned to curate the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011.

Charim Galerie Wien

Dorotheergasse 12/1, 1010 Vienna
www.charimgalerie.at
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ENTREPOT

For centuries Viennese culture has been shaped by its function as a gateway to the Balkans. In keeping with this tradition Vienna has once again become a city of encounter and cultural exchanges – and this especially in the wake of the changes that the 1990s brought to Eastern Europe. An invitation was extended to ten artists, nine male and one female, from Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey who will now be coming together fort he first time. Three countries sharing a common coast on the western Black Sea.
For this exhibition several new pieces will produced, installations and objects by Gabriela Vanga (Romania) and Pravdoliub Ivanov (Bulgaria), photographic works and a joint video by Cengiz Tekin and Sener Özmen (Turkey). These works, together with objects by Vikenti Komitski (Bulgaria) and Miklos Onucsan (Romania) will be stored temporarily in Vienna before they are sent on to very different regions of the world.

René Block

Born in Velbert on the Lower Rhine in 1942, lives and works in Bremen and Berlin

René Block opened his gallery in Berlin in 1964. At about the same time, he began working as a curator for the Neue Berliner Kunstverein, the Berliner Festwochen, and the city’s Akademie der Künste. From 1997 to 2006, Block was director of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. After realizing the Nordic Pavilion for the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), he retired from major international projects. In the same year, he founded a platform for contemporary Turkish art, TANAS, in Berlin.

Galerie Krinzinger

Seilerstätte 16, 1010 Vienna
www.galerie-krinzinger.at
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An Elusive Object of Art

The project presents itself as a typical show of artifacts in space. It focuses on the exhibits’ character as objects, which is treated with denial, irony, or mystification. The artists participating in the exhibition have rethought and reinvented this aspect by physically abusing or rearranging the objects. They find this characteristic of an artifact both repulsive and unavoidable. The project is grounded in the never-ending struggle of contemporary art with its own materiality. It highlights the irritation of artists from Eastern Europe, who are generally neglected by the market and turn toward the material aspects of art and its understanding as a commodity.

Iara Boubnova

Born in Moscow, lives in Sofia

Iara Boubnova is founding Director of Sofia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). Her curatorial projects include Beyond Credit, Istanbul, and Photo I, Photo You, London (2010); Common History and its Personal Stories, MUSA, Vienna; From Ideology to Economy, Moscow; Liquid Frontiers, Lille (2009); History in Present Tense (2007); Dialectics of Hope (2005); the 2nd and 1st Moscow Biennials (2007, 2005); the Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main (2002), and the Bulgarian National Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999).

Galerie Dana Charkasi

Fleischmarkt 11, 1010 Vienna
www.dana-charkasi.com
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EAST: EXCITABLE SPEECH: WEST

Kidnapping the East may be a necessary if post- Romantic desire, but also a desperate urge to rethink the politics of difference and division within the trans-European context. Emancipatory in itself, “excitable speech” refers to the liminal areas of the Caucasus and Eurasia, mapping a nobetween zone of phantasmagorias, fictive narratives, and dubious facts where history appears as a possibility, a filiation, an exercise. Here, the East-West encounter is articulated as a performative and relational act—a mistranslation of sorts—where language and rhetoric are considered subversive elements in the economies if not-politics of post-imperial conquest and heroic resistance. The satirical sufi figure of Molla Nasreddin acts as an inspiration and guide through the vocabularies of concrete, historical, but also fictitious and mystic libraries of the past and contemporary political realities.

Adam Budak

Born in Jaworzno, Poland in 1966; lives and works in Graz and Krakow

Adam Budak is currently curator for contemporary art at the Kunsthaus Graz of the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz. He has curated a large number of international exhibitions and worked with acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Diana Thater, Maria Lassnig, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Monika Sosnowska. He was one of the curators of the Manifesta7 exhibition Principle Hope (2008, Italy). His forthcoming exhibitions include a solo show of Antje Majewski (Gimmel’s World) and Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence.

Engholm Galerie Wien

Schleifmühlgasse 3, 1040 Vienna
www.engholmengelhorn.com
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son:DA more items for the room

The exhibition “more items for the room” sees son:DA resuming their computer mouse drawings of everyday objects from 2010, which are now presented in real space. The Mouse computer drawings of an object, which are considered to be more important than the real objects. The new objects redefine, redesign, and recontextualize the room. The installation oscillates between the real and the artificial, between what is and what was. It revives the items that formerly constituted and defined the space before the logic of the white cube prevailed.

Ivica Buljan

Born in Sinj /Croatia in 1965, lives and works in Croatia

Ivica Buljan, whose productions have been presented at numerous international festivals, held a guest professorship at the Académie expérimentale des Théâtres in Paris, Brussels, and Moscow and is now professor at the National Drama School in Saint-Étienne. He was the director and founder of the Croatian National Drama Theatre in Split, the Mini Theatre in Ljubljana, and the World Theatre Festival in Zagreb. He has received a great number of prestigious awards such as the Golden Lion for his work.

Mario Mauroner

Weihburggasse 26, 1010 Vienna
www.galerie-mam.com
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Material Culture / Things in our Hands

Artists from Eastern Europe quite often seem to misunderstand the critical role art has come to play in the West. Instead of openly resisting or subverting the rules of capitalist society they apparently succumb to the seduction of luxurious commodities and shamelessly seek material success.
The works of Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová address the Eastern European plunge into capitalism by way of the early avant-garde strategy of using everyday life as material to be transformed. For the artists, “material culture” signifies an attitude toward materiality and objectification. Instead of renouncing commodified relationships, they embark on a quest for transforming them into art – not by imagining utopian alternatives but by systematically exploiting them in search of a possible change.

Dessislava Dimova

Born in Karnobat (Bulgaria) in 1976, lives and works in Brussels

The writer and curator is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Art Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. She holds an MA in philosophy from CRMEP, Middlesex University, and an MA in Art History from the Bulgarian Academy of Arts, Sofia. In 2010, she curated Thank You for Your Understanding (2nd International Antakya Biennial, Turkey). Her first novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, was published in Bulgarian in 2009. She is a founding member of the Art Affairs and Documents Foundation, Sofia and founding editor of blistermagazine.com.

Christine König Galerie

Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1040 Vienna
www.christinekoeniggalerie.com
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Fade Up / Flash Back

Sanja Iveković (Croatia), Flaka Haliti (Kosovo), and Hannes Zebedin (Austria) share a common interest in political issues that they link to questions concerning the relations between the public and the private. The exhibition’s title EAST BY SOUTHWEST has also provided the geopolitical starting point for the selection of their works, which deal with social aspects and partly with historical events that also include wars and their consequences. The exhibition takes both a critical view on socialist Yugoslavia and addresses traumatic moments during the country’s disintegration while also drawing a line back to the past of Austrian-Yugoslav history.

Silvia Eiblmayr

Lives and works in Vienna

Silvia Eiblmayr holds a PhD in art history and works as a curator in the field of contemporary art. From 1998 to 2008, she was director of the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck. Since 1988, she has been working as a lecturer and guest professor in Austria and abroad. She is the author and editor of numerous texts and publications. Her book Woman as Picture. The Female Body in 20th Century Art was published in Berlin in 1993 (1997, 2001).

Galerie Martin Janda

Eschenbachgasse 11, 1010 Vienna
www.martinjanda.at
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„Be careful because it might stamp itself on your mind.“

The motto for the exhibition of the four Polish artists comes from a poem by Wojciech Bąkowski. The works presented oscillate between extreme human passions like fear and love. The juxtaposition of these emotions makes for a room charged with tension in which visitors receive sometimes deeply moving dramatic waves of associations and meanings.
Wojciech Bąkowski, Anna Baumgart, and Dorota Buczkowska approach this disturbing area in a more or less direct way, relying on different media from sculpture and drawing to video clips. Norman Leto’s fragment of the film Sailor comprises an illustrated lecture with various sociological, philosophical and anthropological statements, which presents itself as an ironic counterpoint to human nature, as it were.

Ewa Gorządek

Born in Warsaw in 1957, lives and works in Warsaw

Ewa Gorządek is an art historian, art critic, and author. She is curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Gorządek has curated many exhibitions of works by contemporary artists, including Steven Pippin, Oleg Kulik, Adam Adach, Agnieszka Kalinowska, Zbigniew Rogalski, and the AES Group. She was also responsible for Really, the Young Are Realists, an exhibition of works by Polish artists (in collaboration with S. Szabłowski), the Polish-Russian show Behind the Red Horizon, as well as Polish Woman: Medium – Shadow – Image (in collaboration with A. Zawadowska) and Concrete Legacy (in collaboration with S. Szabłowski).

Galerie Steinek

Eschenbachgasse 4, 1010 Vienna
www.galerie.steinek.at
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ACTUAL

Europe one hour before, or after, the sunrise frontier, is that which tried real socialism, a failed political regime, and which still cannot find its definition. It was a frenzy against the past, that the regime wished to destroy, but were limited to distort it and then made from the past a cause for nationalism. Artists were highly involved in ideological propaganda, but, as they are supposed to be, imposed their independence, defended their individuality and realized what liberty could mean. Some of them emigrating got their liberty. (…) The East has very present in its imaginary frontiers – political, ethnic or religious, and frequently passing through them. The friends and the parents are oscillating between commuting and emigration meanwhile the artists, spread throughout the whole Europe, are feeling free as much as their art is of actual interest.

Ion Grigorescu

Born in Bucharest in 1945, lives and works in Bucharest
Ion Grigorescu’s cross-media conceptual oeuvre is widely regarded as that of one of the most important artists of the eastern European postwar avant-garde. His work, to be seen in the Romanian pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and the Tate Modern, London, for example, in 2011, has been shown in numerous outstanding presentations and prominent institutions such as at the 6th Berlin Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the MUMOK, Vienna (2010); the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2009); the documenta 12 in Kassel (2007); in the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2003);; in the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2001); in the Moderna Galerija Ljubljana (2000); in the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the MACBA, Barcelona (1998); in the Romanian pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997); in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1991); and at the XVI Bienal de Sao Paulo (1981).

Galerie Mezzanin

Getreidemarkt 14, 1010 Vienna
www.galeriemezzanin.com
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In The Future Everyone Will Be Anonymous For Fifteen Minutes

Gallery Nova was founded in 1975 in Zagreb. Though it was an official state institution, it had a radical exhibition program, showing avant-garde artists together with the emerging artists’ scene of the time. Since 2003 Gallery Nova has been run by the curatorial collective What, How for Whom [WHW], as a non-profit municipal gallery. Thirty years later, the WHW program is keeping alive contemporary and historical artistic practices that have been continuously ignored by the mainstream/dominant cultural institution. "Yet In The Future Everyone Will Be Anonymous For Fifteen Minutes" aims not to offer an insight into the integral exhibition program of 36 years of Gallery Nova activity, the gallery is treated as one of the exhibitor together with the artists who worked with the gallery in the past and/or in the future. Thus we wanted to point the institutional (socialist) framework that has allowed the production and presentation of radical artistic activities, and the nowadays lack of officiall valorization.

Ana Janevski

Born in Belgrade in 1976, lives and works in Warsaw

Ana Janevski is curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw where she has prepared As soon as I open my eyes I see a film. Experiments in Yugoslav Art in the 60s and 70s. She earned her MPhil at the EHESS in Paris for which she wrote Articulation of Balkanism in Contemporary Art. Among different projects, she co-curated the exhibition This is All Film. Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991 at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. Janevski also co-curated the exhibition Early Years for Kunst-Werke, Berlin. She has recently collaborated with Pierre Bal-Blanc on the Warsaw edition of the exhibition The Living Currency.

Galerie Georg Kargl

Schleifmühlgasse 5, 1010 Vienna
www.georgkargl.com
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Close to Home

“Close to Home,” the exhibition of emerging Polish contemporary art at Lukas Feichtner Gallery brings together two projects, one by Ania and Adam Witkowski (from Gdansk) and another by Bartosz Mucha (from Krakow), both of which explore living spaces as “imaginary terrains.” As young artists, all born in 1978, they work from their apartments. Their domestic spheres are imbued with desires as well as creative and psychological tensions, which are reflected in the objects and even the kind of objects they are able to produce there. Like artists of their generation from all over the world they dream of renting or owning a studio of their own and the creative freedom granted by this. The Witkowskis’ multimedia installation, which explores the space of their apartment in detail, is titled Housemates and follows an ironical tenor articulated in the title of the collage Almost Paradise. The centerpiece of Mucha’s installation is the publication 52 Lazy Weeks, a collection of drafts and plans of ideal or fantastic living spaces developed within the span of a year in which the artist “did not leave the house.”

Magda Kardasz

Born in 1967 in Warsaw, lives and works in Warsaw

Magda Kardasz has been a curator at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw since 1993. After graduating in art history from Warsaw University, she worked for a gallery in Warsaw and for the Stefan Batory Foundation. Since 2008, she has been in charge of a seminar on the organization of exhibitions at Krakow University. For the last five years Kardasz has been involved in the National Gallery’s Kordegarda project; she is currently presenting an ongoing series of exhibitions, often with younger artists, titled Room with a View and focused on the city. She has prepared several exhibitions of Polish contemporary art to be shown in India in the summer of 2011.

Lukas Feichtner Galerie

Seilerstätte 19, 1010 Vienna
www.feichtnergallery.com
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Constructions and stories

The exhibition of works by the couple Běla and Jiří Kolář presents several extraordinary, yet hitherto hardly known pieces which exemplify the inspirational creative flair which helped the artists to establish themselves in the arena of Czech art and guaranteed that their works became an integral part of the international Conceptual Art scene after World War II.
While poet and artist Jiří Kolář gained international renown as early as in the 1960s, Běla Kolářová’s exceptional contribution has only received the recognition it deserves over the last few years. The exhibition comprises assemblages, interpreted objects, drawings, photographs, and collages from the 1950s to the 1980s. It will focus on the experimental processes and technologies employed by the artists and demonstrate that the defining characteristic of their work derives from its profoundly intellectual nature, its sovereign artistic quality, and intimate perspective.

Marie Klimešová

Born in Prague in 1952, lives and works in Prague

Marie Klimešová is a university teacher, free curator, and member of the Czech section of AICA – Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, which she chaired from 2005 to 2007. She was a curator at the National Gallery Prague (1997–2002) and at the City Gallery Prague (1987–1997). Her main exhibitions include Years in Days: Czech Art 1945–1957, City Gallery Prague, 2010; Běla Kolářová, Museum of Art Olomouc, 2006; Jiří Kolář, Musée des Beaux Arts Dijon, 2002; Jitka and Květa Válová, National Gallery Prague, 2000; and Focal Points of Revival: Czech Art 1956–1963, City Gallery Prague, 1994.

Krobath Wien

Eschenbachgasse 9, 1010 Vienna
www.galeriekrobath.at
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… forsakes its existence and gives its shape over to recollection.

The contribution investigates the relationship between object, biography, narrative, and exhibition display through fragments of works by two Eastern European artists from different generations and countries, the young Lithuanian artist Liudvikas Buklys (*1984) and Slovakian documenta participant Stano Filko (*1937), which are complemented by a third, performative contribution by Canadian artist Michele di Menna (*1980).The storyboard: biography, anecdote, treasure hunt, classicism, Siberia, the repository, color, the gesamtkunstwerk, the house, the id, cognition, pause, champagne, precarious. The set: three slats, white, rockets, the bag, a statement, a catalog, an LP, an animation, two objects, a story, a performance, that which remains.

Dünser/Kobald

Born in Vienna in 1980 and 1969, live and work in Vienna

Severin Dünser and Christian Kobald jointly founded and run the exhibition space COCO (Contemporary Concerns) in Vienna. Since May 2009 they have co-curated WUFF, a project realized by COCO and spike art magazine, Curonian Spit, Lithuania and Svinec, Czech Republic; The Flowers, COCO, Vienna; Solace, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York (with Emanuel Layr and Rita Vitorelli); Forschungsbericht, COCO, Vienna; Verausgabungssymposium, COCO, Vienna; Revolver, COCO, Vienna. Both Dünser and Kobald have also curated numerous projects on their own, such as Salon de la Kakanie, Central House of Artists Moscow (S. Dünser) and …out into the broad daylight of Common Sense, a symposium for Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Niederösterreich (Ch. Kobald).

Galerie Emanuel Layr

An der Hülben 2, 1010 Vienna
www.emanuellayr.com
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What about this.

Judith Braun comes from New York City to apply patterns of the universe on the walls of the gallery. Audrey Cottin has drawn folds and knots exploring the convolutions (and distortions) of the human brain. Mariana Castillo Deball watches Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, spread its wings through time. Wings and knots cross each other on the wall. So far, Gintaras Didziapetris has released one issue of a magazine called Ninety. On the occasion of the exhibition, Ninety has commissioned Elena Narbutaite to make a series of pictures of an ancient ritual called smoking. Nicholas Matranga is writing a concept for the show and defines this as his artwork. Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita recently visited the World Forum of Spiritual Culture in Astana, Kazakhstan, where they shot a video about Noospheric economy and evolutionary algorithms. Benjamin Seror takes all this up and sings it – more or less as a Frenchman would do.

Raimundas Malašauskas

Born in Vilnius in 1973, lives and works in Paris

Raimundas Malašauskas is a writer who was a curator-at-large of Artists Space, New York until recently. 2007–2008 visiting curator at the California College of Arts, San Francisco. 1995–2006 curator at CAC Vilnius and CAC TV. He co-wrote the libretto of Cellar Door, an opera by Loris Gréaud staged at the Paris Opera in 2008. His most recent exhibition projects include Sculpture of Space Age at the David Roberts Foundation in London; Into the Belly of a Dove at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City; Repetition Island at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; as well as Clifford Irving Show and Hypnotic Show.

Galerie Andreas Huber

Schleifmühlgasse 6-8
1040 Vienna

www.galerieandreashuber.at
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Gabriele Senn Gallery presents works by Dorota Jurczak, Tomasz Kowalski, Philipp Schwalb, and the Strupek Group. The selection is aimed at both revealing and resolving the importance of regional specifics (like those of Polish popular culture in this case) by unfolding contrasts and correspondences. At first, peculiarities of style, which are oversimplistically read as a characteristic of Eastern European art, seem to become clearer when works are directly confronted with each other. Yet, it soon becomes obvious that even the most conspicuous indications of regional influence cannot be understood without considering international exchange. Distance from or closeness to the source of influence, individual adjustments of appropriation, old and the new interpretations . . . all these elements interact and disrupt a straightforward categorization between the established and the mobile, the modern and the traditional.

Roberto Ohrt

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1954, lives and works in Hamburg

Roberto Ohrt finished his studies with a doctoral thesis on avant-gardes in 1988 (Phantom Avantgarde) and has published numerous essays on the Situationists and on such artists as Martin Kippenberger, Raymond Pettibon, Andreas Hofer, Paul Thek, André Butzer, and Jason Rhoades. His most recent work was dedicated to the almost forgotten art historian Edgar Wind (1900–1971). He organized exhibitions for the Centre Georges Pompidou, ZKM Karlsruhe, Transcontinental Nomadenoase (Miami and Mexico City), and the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg. He co-founded the Akademie Isotrop (Hamburg, 1996–2001), Silverbridge (Paris/San Francisco), and the 8th Salon, Hamburg (show room, library, studios).

Galerie Senn

Schleifmühlgasse 1A, 1010 Vienna
www.galeriesenn.at
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Portraits and Self-Portraits in Private Collections

The exhibition at Knoll Gallery is based on a survey of art collecting in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania, showcasing approximately thirty artworks on loan from private art collections in these countries. It features a selection of portraits and self-portraits and focuses on works from Romanian private collections.
Offering amazing insights, the exhibition has two objectives: firstly, to present various artistic forms of expression and representation and to show how certain emotions are conveyed; and secondly, to highlight new perspectives in art collecting, considering that establishing an art collection is also an act of self-representation.
Next to exhibits by artists from other countries, the show mainly comprises works by Romanian artists such as Ana BĂNICĂ, Răzvan BOAR, Alina BUGA, Cătălin BURCEA, Raul CIO, Nicolae COMĂNESCU, Teodor GRAUR, Oana LOHAN, Gili MOCANU, Roman TOLICI, and Ecaterina VRANA.

Liliana Popescu

Born in Bucharest in 1975, lives and works in Bucharest.

In 1997, Liliana Popescu graduated from Bucharest University’s Faculty of Communication Sciences, where she then taught for ten years. She also holds a degree in Law since 2003. She is currently doing a PhD in Art Economics at Bucharest’s National Institute of Economic Research. From 2002 to 2008, she organized numerous exhibitions for the city’s H’art Gallery, working with emerging international artists. From 2008 to 2010, she was director of Point Contemporary, Bucharest, where she presented works by young Romanian artists. She is presently running Prospekt, the city’s newest gallery.

Knoll Galerie Wien

Gumpendorfer Straße 18, 1060 Vienna
www.knollgalerie.at
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The Future is Now

Žilvinas Landzbergas is a dream weaver, who is known for placing the viewer in uncanny artificial surroundings that seem at once familiar and distant. As a visual artist with experience in stage design, Landzbergas is concerned with storytelling through sculpture and installation. Loosely based on sci-fi literature and films, the installation shown in the exhibition is a made-up story comprised of animation and sculpture that questions the future of today’s society.

Born in Kaunas (Lithuania) in 1979, Žilvinas Landzbergas has exhibited his works since 2005 and divides his time between Vilnius and Amsterdam. He is represented by Galerie Fons Welters and Galerija Vartai.

Laura Rutkutė

Born in Vilnius in 1974, lives and works in Dresden

Laura Rutkutė is an independent curator and director of the Vartai Gallery in Vilnius. She was commissioner for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, featuring Žilvinas Kempinas’ installation Tube. She acts as chief curator of the ongoing international project ARTscape, launched by the Vartai Gallery as part of the programme realized by Vilnius as the European Capital of Culture 2009. Together with Raúl Zamudio, she curated the exhibition City Without Walls at the 6th Liverpool Biennial in 2010.

Projektraum Viktor Bucher

Praterstrasse 13/1/2
1020 Vienna
www.projektraum.at
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Casualties

Thea Djordjadze’s installations clearly reveal her fascination with functionalism and formalism. Her works examine the symbiosis of the supposed contradiction between conceptual and intuitive action. What about the nature of function and form regardless of their utility?
Thea Djordjadze’s objects, sculptures, and installations unfold a poetic analysis of our everyday environment. Djordjadze explores the meaning of a minimalist language of forms as well as the materials of modernism and post-modernism and their attributions. The artist breaks these elements down into their ideological components in order to highlight the allegedly invisible things which architecture and design have to ignore not least because of their proclaimed functionalism.

Nicolaus Schafhausen

Born in Düsseldorf in 1965, lives and works in Rotterdam

Nicolaus Schafhausen has been director of the Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam since 2005. This renowned institution, which has grown over the last two decades, principally appoints its leading positions internationally. Besides its conspicuity as a space for contemporary art, the Witte de With acts as a centre for cultural theory and discourse. Schafhausen was curator of the German Pavilion for the 52nd and 53rd Venice Biennials. Schafhausen is author and editor of numerous publications on contemporary art.

Galerie Meyer Kainer

Eschenbachgasse 9, 1010 Vienna
www.meyerkainer.com
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Dead Letter Office

Against all the stereotyped choices offered by the neat geopolitical rebranding of the Former East (formerly considered faraway and magical in its weird otherness, as well as irrational, poor, underdeveloped, and aspiring, like a younger brother who remains forever inferior) into a wildlife park of the Omnipresent West (technologically advanced, rich, superior, though currently in crisis) and the similarly motivated division between the North (cold, dark, rational, expensive, Protestant, old, perpetually thinking about a safe Zukunft) and the South (warm, sunny, emotional, cheap, Catholic, young, living in the oblivious condition of the eternal mañana), as well as possible combinations of the above-mentioned directions (East by Southwest is one such hybrid), the position we must occupy is that of a permanently and consciously marginal presence. The margin, in the South, East, North and West, offers a temporary hideout zone, an exclusive refuge, in which we do not need to declare where we want to belong – at least until we are told to leave. The fragile dignity of the stateless, the exiled, appeals to us more than any idea of inscribing our bodies and minds into existing political geographies or of representing a nation or region – however pleasant, amusing, civilized, and rich in traditions some nations and regions may be. While appreciating the pleasures of traveling and the joy of uninhibited global communication, we would rather enjoy a longer, improvised picnic on the side of the road.

Adam Szymczyk

Born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland in 1970, lives and works in Basel

Adam Szymczyk is director and chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel. He studied art history at the University of Warsaw. In 1997 he was among the co-founders of the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, where he continued working as a curator and writer until 2003. Since 2003, he has organized over 60 exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel. In 2008 he co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art under the title When things cast no shadow with Elena Filipovic. He received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2011.

Galerie nächst St. Stephan

Grünangergasse 1/2, 1010 Vienna
www.schwarzwaelder.at
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Fragments of Memory

Nil Yalter is both on the inside and on the outside, defies geographical boundaries. She has the intellectual freedom to look from the West to the East and from the East to the West. Only a universal language of art can guarantee its independence of mechanisms of representation. Using art as a compass guiding us into the future, we destroy our dogmatic heritage. The “East by Southwest” event contributes to the universal dialogue in the field of contemporary art and opens up new horizons of creativity.

Derya Yücel

Born in Istanbul in 1979, lives and works in Istanbul

Derya Yücel graduated from Yildiz Technical University and teaches at T.C. İstanbul Kültür University and İstanbul Bigli University. In the years 2007 and 2008 she curated the 6th and 7th Korean-Turkish Exchange Exhibitions in Incheon, Korea, and Istanbul, as well as Save As... Contemporary Art from Turkey, Santralİstanbul and Triennale Bovisa, Milan. In 2009, she, together with Simona Vidmar, was responsible for 28th Today Turkish Artists at Istanbul’s Akbank Art Center and curated the exhibitions Memory City and Openly for Istanbul’s European Capital of Culture programme.