BREGENZ.- Starting in 2016 KUB Billboards constitute an independent line of programming to enhance the visibility of a younger generation of artists. KUB Billboards concentrate in particular on those artists who have been growing up in the midst of recent epochal turning points: starting from the demise of state socialism, and the increasingly globalized world that followed from it, and that, throughout the 1990s, was more and more superimposed by a digitalized capitalization of all spheres of life. In the network economy in which now we live, the internet, the logic of algorithmic processing, social media and surveillance are conditions of our everyday existence. The perception of our »reality« has drastically changed, and with it the modes of its conceptualization.

The works by the Paris-based artist Daiga Grantina manifest themselves in processes of continually balancing ambivalence and the alternations between different forms of expression, materiality, and systems of reference. Her recent sculptural ensembles foreground transformative potential in particular, which Grantina uses to undermine clear distinctions between such opposites as fluid and solid, soft and hard, as well as relations between body and language, nature and technology, and interior and exterior. Her sculptures consisting of plastic, textiles, and metal simultaneously combine instances of life and necrosis, as well as the profane and sinister.

For the fourth and last project in this year’s series of KUB Billboards Grantina is transcribing her sculptures into two-dimensional pictograms. These graphic deductions were originally conceived for a floor plan of an exhibition by the artist in Riga. Whilst there they were employed as symbolic placeholders for objects in space, in Bregenz they have become autonomous works in themselves: »painted« directly on the billboard canvases utilizing reflective glass beads employed in road markings, the pictograms now appear as discrete pictorial acts. In their materiality — the beads coagulating into lines and images — they extend the logic of Grantina’s sculptures.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock in collaboration with Lidiya Anastasova.