GRAZ.- In Dialogues, the German artist Stephanie Kiwitt, who resides in Brussels, has for the first time compiled various works from recent years that take the form of publications and exhibition projects in a joint context. New junctures arise from image to image, never before seen in this way—each new image is a leap through time and space, from Belgium to Marseille, Prague to Ghent. Or perhaps these encounters are actually collisions rather than new junctures? Sections, cutouts, images extending beyond their edges, leading away, leading somewhere else—perhaps into a different picture? Kiwitt succeeds, in a unique way, in situating her photographs, series, and books along this threshold where a description opens and facilitates something rather than formulating and concluding it. This opening does not evolve without help, for it must be initiated—through images arising not randomly and also not incidentally, but which on the other hand don’t pretend that they have always known best, images with an inherent sense of restraint, through which the images foster a dialogue, both between the images themselves and with the beholder.
The exhibition at Camera Austria is accompanied by a homonymous publication in the Edition Camera Austria, with texts by Reinhard Braun, Steven Humblet, Tina Schulz, Carsten Tabel, Eveline Vanfraussen, Bart Verschaffel, and numerous black-and-white illustrations by Stephanie Kiwitt.
At Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM– Graz), two exhibitions discuss relational and site-specific aesthetics: the artistic practice of Claudia Märzendorfer (b. 1969 in Vienna, lives in Vienna) includes projects that elude conventional expectations about art as a production process. Her works of art—whether volatile installations made of dust particles or precarious ice sculptures like playable LPs fashioned from frozen water—tend toward the ephemeral and non-recurring. They are about shifting and subverting normal situations, as is the case with the knitted (re)construction of truck replacement parts and a three-dimensional wall drawing. Driving her artistic undertakings is the nonacceptance of given circumstances, the temporal nature of time being the most essential element. At the same time, a wealth of knowledge about external determinants, conditions, and practices is part of her process of producing art.
The architect and artist Ed Gfrerer (b. 1958 in Paternion, lives in Graz) bases his artistic studies on concrete space as he works on site. In advance, with sketch-like drawings, he considers possible access points and interventions, which finally allows him to intervene through an expansion or densification of interstitial spaces. Gfrerer therefore also uses found items, from which he develops temporary constructions or sculptural forms that imbue the exhibition site with new conceptual space. By precisely processing the existing into new objects and situations, the artist questions what is often conventional self-conviction in terms of resource use, thus calling for heightened sensitivity to one’s immediate environment and its utilization.
