VENICE, ITALY.-Hans Schabus will represent Austria at this year’s Venice Biennial. Hans Schabus, born in Watschig, Austria, in 1970, has attracted attention in recent years above all with his contribution to Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt (“Western,” 2002) and solo exhibitions at the Secession in Vienna (“Astronaut [be right back],” 2003), in the Bonner Kunstverein (“Transport,” 2003), and in the Kunsthaus Bregenz (“Das Rendezvousproblem/The rendezvous problem,” 2004). For Venice, Hans Schabus has created a monumental work titled “The Last Land” which endows the Austrian Pavilion with a new identity. Instead of the pavilion building, visitors will be confronted with a huge barrier rising in front of them like a massif with the pavilion only looking out at its far corners. The outside is as rejective as the inside is accessible: along labyrinthine staircases, the way leads up to the summit where viewers will finally be granted a look at the sea and the city through skylights. With a bold gesture, Hans Schabus’ work “The Last Land” transfers the myth of the mountain enveloping Austria to the city on the lagoon built on water.

Max Hollein, Commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion and Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt: “The crucial thing for me was to chose an artist who conceives the pavilion as a unity, a singular space – not as the site of an exhibition, whether current or retrospective, but as an object for an artistic intervention. I was not concerned with curating an exhibition or presenting a mature lifework but rather with offering an artist an international framework, which is what the Venice Biennale represents, at a neuralgic point within his development.”

For Hans Schabus, the exhibition space has never been a neutral area of presentation but always a specific site with its coordinates and numerous relations which he takes possession of in order to subject it to a physical and psychological redimensioning. A meticulous process of drawing closer also preceded the present work for the Austrian Pavilion. Preparations started with research work in the artist’s studio in Vienna where Hans Schabus gathered material on the history of the Austrian Pavilion, the first international fairs, and especially on the Venice Biennial, as well as on the past of the two neighboring countries Austria and Italy.