Photography as a Tool

ARTISTS OF THE GALLERY

photography as a tool

Opening: May 16, 2023, 7 PM
Duration: May 17 – June 15, 2023

Shumon Ahmed; Kader Attia; Gottfried Bechtold; Monica Bonvicini; Chris Burden; Johanna Calle; Christian Eisenberger; Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller ; Angelika Krinzinger; William Mackrell; Maha Malluh; Hans Op de Beeck; Bernd Oppl; Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian; Anja Ronacher; Hans Schabus; Eva Schlegel; Erik Schmidt; Alfred Tarazi; Gavin Turk; Jannis Varelas; Martin Walde; Lois Weinberger; Thomas Zipp
Shumon Ahmed (*1977, Dhaka, Bangladesch) lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesch. The multidisciplinary artist tests the boundaries of different art forms through exploring and fusing the cracks between video, photography, installation, sound, performance and text to conceptualize ideas and stories that are seemingly contradictory, yet profoundly intertwined.


Kader Attia (*1970, Dugny, Germany) lives and works in Paris und Berlin (France / Germany). Since the beginning of his practice, the Algerian French artist and curator of the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022) Kader Attia (born 1970 in Dugny, Seine Saint-Denis), has been interested in socio-cultural phenomena, especially those that arise in connection with and as a result of colonialism.


Gottfried Bechtold (*1947 Bregenz, Austria) lives and works in Hörbranz, Voralberg, Austria. In his work, Gottfried Bechtold focuses on the extension of the concept of art, above all of sculpture. Based on sculpture and influenced by the art of post-minimalism, Land Art and conceptual art, Bechtold initially experimented with different media such as photography, film and video.


Monica Bonvicini (*1965 Venice, Italy) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Monica Bonvicini emerged as a visual artist and started exhibiting internationally in the mid-1990s. Her multifaceted practice investigates the relationship between architecture, power structures, gender roles, control mechanisms and space.


Chris Burden (*1946 Boston, USA) lives and works in Topanga, USA. The work of U.S. conceptual artist Chris Burden strongly influenced not only performance but also sculpture in the 1970s. Chris Burden studied architecture, physics, and fine arts at the University of California. In the 1970s, a series of spectacular performances took place in which Burden often went to the limit of what he could physically endure.


Johanna Calle (*1965 Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Colombian artist Johanna Calle finds the themes for her poetic works on paper mainly in the realities that arise from her Latin American background. Through an expanded concept of drawing and after intensive periods of research, her refined artistic practice sheds light on important social and political issues, such as social inequality, violence, ecological concerns or the loss of cultural identity.


Christian Eisenberger (*1978 in Semriach, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Christian Eisenberger's stylistically and quantitatively rich oeuvre resists precise categorization. His work has always oscillated between obsessive compulsion and absolute freedom. Eisenberger does not deprive his art of aesthetic pretensions, which is why it speaks directly to the viewer.


Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller (*1979 Essen, BRD, *1984 Friesach, Austria) live and work in Vienna, Austria. Many of the artifacts of Hanakam & Schuller, an artist duo that lives in Vienna, are shapeshifters, changing their outer form and then reappearing in a variety of contexts. As artists and explorers, Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller redesign the rules of the fine arts for their own purposes and create unconventional arrangements and new world designs in videos and objects. They also work with applied art forms.


Angelika Krinzinger (*1969 Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Angelika Krinzinger's works are evocative of the manifestations of systematic science-oriented photography from the 19th century. Just as she “reanimates” the dead plants in recalling the immediate photography of an early phase, in the body images she works with the technique that has gained popularity since the Surrealist movement, namely, the fragmentation of reality within a picture – a perspective that is primarily intrinsic to photography.


William Mackrell (*1983 London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. Mackrell uses his body as a catalyst through which a complex reality is altered, unravelled through his performances and revealed in his objects. The artist, who always works in relation to the space he is inhabiting, leaves behind traces and fragile assemblages of language that delve into bodily sensations of touch, absence and desire.


Maha Malluh (*1959 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) lives and works in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The fascination with tactility is an essential feature of Maha Malluh’s oeuvre. Beginning first with a sense of comfort derived from touching familiar objects, the relationship with such objects developed so that she became estranged from them.


Hans Op de Beeck (*1969 Turnhout, Belgium) lives and works in Brussels und Gooik, Belgium. In his career of more than twenty years, Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck has developed into an artistic all-rounder. Known mainly for his large, immersive installations, his sculptures, drawings, paintings and his art films, he also developed as a playwright, theatre and opera director, scenographer, and costume designer. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it.


Bernd Oppl (*Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria, Bernd Oppl’s artistic fields of action are architectural spatial models, photographs, video installations, transfer models and screens that combine to form complex systems which inspire and question, analyse and deceive our perception. With the help of camera and video, we are able to have new visual experiences and to gain changed perspectives that we would not experience with the unaided eye.


Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian (*1975, Tehran, Iran, *1978 Tehran, Iran, *1980 Knoxville, USA) live and work in Dubai, UAE seit 2009. They work independently and together propagating a form of collaboration that doesn't suppress individualism. The seeds of their language were sown as early as 1999 in Iran. Their practice offers up a novel redefinition of the collective, as theirs is constantly growing and contracting to incorporate friends, writers, and artists at large. It entails the use of both low and high art references, and freely embraces 'what is considered marginal, wasted, wrong, messed up, useless, and taken for granted'.


Anja Ronacher (*1979 Salzburg, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Anja Ronacher studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Scenography, MA 2005), at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, and received her MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art in London in 2008.


Hans Schabus (*1970 Watschig, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Hans Schabus’ works are directly related to spatial thinking and experience and understanding of socio-political infrastructures and its impact on the lived environment.


Eva Schlegel (*1960 Hall, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Eva Schlegel's work includes photographs, objects, and installations concerned with the interaction of objects and perception, especially with the contradictions and ruptures that frequently occur in this relationship.


Erik Schmidt (*1968 Herford, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. German artist Erik Schmidt creates works that engage with symbolic processes within various social subsystems. Immersing himself in foreign contexts plays a significant role in his paintings, videos, photographs, and drawings.


Alfred Tarazi (*1980 Beirut, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. In an artistic practice shaped by the ultimate event horizon of the Lebanese Civil War, Alfred Tarazi deploys his visual strategies in order to dig out fields of memory, emplaced haphazardly in a vast expanse of the present tense, often without direction or destination.


Gavin Turk (*1967 Guildford, UK) lives and works in London, UK. Gavin Turk is a British born, international artist. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture now taken for granted, including painted bronze, waxwork, recycled art-historical icons and the use of rubbish in art.


Jannis Varelas (*1977 Athens, Greece) lives and works in Athens and Los Angeles, Greece, USA. Jannis Varelas' work reflects on the human condition. His paintings are the outcome of a process of reinvention and metamorphosis of the self. With his works, Varelas goes back to the images of the body, exploring the form and the cultural representations of the human figure and its psychological landscape.


Martin Walde (*1957 Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. With a pronounced joy of discovery, Martin Walde experiments with liquids, colors, smells and textures, creating his works from a rich spectrum of unusual materials such as silicone, Styrofoam, plasma, latex, acrylic, carbon or gelatinous substances.


Lois Weinberger (*1947 Stams Tyrol, Austria) died in Vienna, Austria 2020. Lois Weinberger worked on a poetic-political network that draws our attention to marginal zones and questions hierarchies of various types. Weinberger, who saw himself as a field worker, embarked on ethno-poetic works that formed the basis for his decades of artistic investigations of natural and man-made spaces in the 1970s.


Thomas Zipp (*1966 Heppenheim, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Thomas Zipp is one of the most influential contemporary German artists. He taught at the University of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has been a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2008.