VIENNA, AUSTRIA.- Kunsthalle Wien Project Space presents assume vivid astro focus – Open Call, on view through August 27, 2006. assume vivid astro focus – behind this name, as if invented for a pop band or an intergalactic spaceship, an artists’ collective is concealed with a varying cast that transforms motifs from pop culture and art history into rich, colorful, voluptuous, artworks appealing to all senses.

After Tokyo, São Paulo, New York and Paris, assume vivid astro focus, for the first time performing in Austria, will now permute the Kunsthalle Wien project space under the motto OPEN CALL: artists, musicians, students, performers and graffiti artists are invited to join them in designing the space and performing in it. assume vivid astro focus* (avaf for short) is the pseudonym of an artists’ collective whose individual members prefer not to be named. avaf propagates multiple authorship so as to abolish the star cult round the personalities of artistic geniuses and so exclusively set art and its experience into the focus of public attention. avaf’s works have quite a political character: they refer to political subjects, their production and their openness to a broad reception is democratic, and their declared goal is “to reach people in ways they don’t even know they are being reached”.

avaf’s works are mainly site specific and multimedial. In their spatial interventions, wall- and floor-covering paperspreads are combined with film programs, projections, music programs, drawings and installations; stickers, masks and T-shirts round off this broad medial spectrum. Various motifs of the most diverse provenance are sampled and re-mixed – the broadband of “materials” ranges from Tibetan prayer rugs (thankas) to softcore pornos.

Scarcely a pictorial motif is not thought worthy of use. Inspired by pop culture and everyday aesthetics, historical and spiritual art, an aesthetics emerges of appropriation and collage. Fantastic environments a là Alice in Wonderland screening naked people, drag queens, flowers, butterflies and birds of paradise lead to a sensorial overload that seems to explode the limits of perception.

Kunsthalle Wien, assume vivid astro focus, 2nd press release, June 2006 avaf have been shown in the following institutions: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2005), Tate Liverpool (2005), Whitney Biennale (2004), Deitch Projects, New York (2003), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2002), and Paço das Artes, São Paulo (1998).