GRAZ.- Inspired by Ernst Fischer’s 1959 publication titled ‘The Necessity of Art – A Marxist Approach’ the summer season of new commissions and artistic research at the
Grazer Kunstverein is guided by Fischer’s claim that art is not only necessary in order to recognise and change the world, but that art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent within it. For Fischer this magic is located precisely in our ability to visualise potential, and to use this power to shape and control our natural world.
Throughout summer, the Grazer Kunstverein is dedicated to exploring ideas around the transformative potential of art as inspired by our relationship to nature, by presenting three very different projects dealing with the influence of nature in ways that are physical, performative, poetic and metaphorical.
Ruth E Lyons is developing WWWW a new line of alternative work-wear WWWW a new line of alternative work-wear WWWW designed specifically for the female body working across industrial landscapes. Fiston Mwanza Mujila performs extracts from his powerful book of poetry Le Fleuve dans le Ventre / Der Fluß im Bauch [The River in the Belly], which takes on themes of solitude and exile, shaped and inspired by the coursing waters of the Congo River. Edward Clydesdale Thomson introduces an abstract sculptural garden that tends to ideas around care and commitment, and which will eventually grow into a real garden here at the Grazer Kunstverein.
Alongside works by Lyons, Mwanza Mujila, and Clydesdale Thomson, traces from The Grazer Kunstverein's spring season will remain in the building, adding to the chorus of voices coming together at the Grazer Kunstverein under the museum's guiding leitmotif ‘The Necessity of Art’.
Ruth E Lyons (New Commission, Summer 2017)
WWWW stands for Women’s Wear for Worldly Work, and celebrates the spectacular potential of gender parity. The project stems from the artists’ personal experience of working as a female cultural producer in various male-dominated industrial environments ranging from salt mines, construction sites to fabrication workshops and being continually frustrated by the lack of purpose designed work-wear for women working in such scenarios. WWWW is an urgent visual and performance-based response to the marginalization of women that this lack represents as we face rapid and widespread industrialization of world landscapes.
In the evolution of WWWW the research, focus groups, business pitch, and development of test pieces at the Grazer Kunstverein, each become sites for performative gestures that highlight the often unconscious bias built into commonplace situations and environments. In this way WWWW explores how the WWWW explores how the WWWW structure of our clothing and the shape of our landscape are part of vast historical systems that inhibit the feminine. Simultaneously these performative strategies offer an imaginary and spectacular vision of the potential of embraced gender parity through the creation of forms that give space for the female to embody a fully expressive, capable, physical role in the activity of world making.
During her stay, the artist, together with Martin Griesbacher and Sabine Hirzer, is holding a series of focus groups for participants from Graz-based industry, to develop research towards a new line of clothing. This co-operation with the Institute of Art History and Institute of Sociology of the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz takes place within the scope of the research project ‘Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds, or Contemporary Art between Ars and Techne. Concerning the Outstanding Significance of Art Production in Styria for Relational Aesthetics in the International Art Context. A Project for the Exploration of a Desideratum for Contemporary Art Historiography.’
Ruth E Lyons was born in Dublin (Ireland) in 1983. She makes large-scale sculptural gallery and public works concerned with landscape and deep time. Over the past years she has created artworks in the sky (Sky is the Limit, public commission for Scoil Naomh Eoin, Co. Meath, 2012), the sea (Pinking on Sea, Kinsale Arts Festival, 2014) and underground (Salarium 230million BCE – 2023 CE commission with EUSalt Salarium 230million BCE – 2023 CE commission with EUSalt Salarium 230million BCE – 2023 CE Association, on-going). Recent exhibitions include Forecast of the Next Century, Forecast of the Next Century, Forecast of the Next Century Broad Art Museum, Michigan, 2016; Riddle of the Burial Grounds, Extra City, Antwerp, 2016; and Follies of Youth, Hepworth Wakefield Gallery, Yorkshire, 2015. Lyons is an artist in residence in Fire Station Artist Studios Dublin 2017–2019.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila (On Display, Summer 2017)
The Congo River is a great heaving mass of water, an unstoppable force of nature that arcs through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The deepest river in the world, it was gifted to a young Fiston Mwanza Mujila by his father when he was a child. Since then it has been a major source of inspiration for his text-based practice, so much so that he dedicated an entire collection of poetry to it. Mwanza Mujila writes poetry, fiction, and works for the stage. Le Fleuve dans le Ventre / Der Fluß im Bauch [The River in the Belly] uses text to embody the Congo river, becoming that great ambiguous wave of ferocious laziness, that brings with it life but also carries away the dead. Mwanza Mujila is impregnated with the river, an act not of love but of violence, as he uses his muse to reflect on the turbulent and chaotic years of civil war and dictatorship that have marked the DRC since independence in 1960. Mwanza Mujila’s text has the power to hypnotise, with penetrating repetition, an enormity of depth, and clarity of breadth, claiming back through language that which has been swept away.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1981. He studied Literature and Humanities before leaving Congo in 2007, since then he has lived in several countries, including Belgium, Germany, France and Austria. In 2009/2010, he was the Writer in Residence of the City of Graz. Mujila writes poetry, fiction and works for the stage. Selective bibliography: Poèmes et rêvasseries [Poems and Daydreams], Lingua Editiones, 2008; Nach dem Sturm [After the Storm] in collaboration with authors from Graz-Karlau and Garsten prisons, Leykam Verlag, 2010; Craquelures [Cracks], L’Arbre à paroles, 2011; Le Fleuve dans le Ventre [The River in the Belly], Édition Thanhäuser, 2013; Tram 83, Métailié, 2014.
Edward Clydesdale Thomson (On Display, Summer 2017)
Edward Clydesdale Thomson is plotting out a garden for the Grazer Kunstverein – it will become a real, living environment that will gradually grow, flourish and decay throughout the coming years. The first iteration of this long-term project will be presented for the summer season of 2017. Tools and ropes, fans and hoses lay the groundwork in a sculptural garden planted around the concrete galleries.
This instalation combines works including The Distracted Gardener & The Plumbing Subverter (2013) and Subverter (2013) and Subverter Inflatable Paradise (2016) where Edward Clydesdale Thomsons’ abstracted tools bridge a transition between house and garden, from the realm of the domestic and personal, to the symbolic and collective. With this he investigates the notion of landscaping as an activity that has resonance with art making in being able to sculpt and delimit a space of both production, experience and care. For Ernst Fischer, the control of the human hand over the land was one of the most powerful, magical and distinguishing features of the human condition. Echoing this sentiment, here the artist also troubles and complicates our desire to control the living world, by thinking closely about our role as artists within it.
Edward Clydesdale Thomson, born in 1982, is a Scottish/Danish artist based in Rotterdam (Netherlands). He is a graduate of the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and the BArch program at the Glasgow school of Art. He was resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2011–12). In 2011 he was awarded the Lecturis Award and nominated for the Prix de Rome. Notable recent shows include The Society Machine, Malmo Konstmuseum; Nothin’ Shakin’ but the Leaves on the Trees, Marabouparken Konsthall, 2015; and The Distracted Gardener & The Plumbing Subverter, Yeo Workshop, 2013. He is currently in the middle of a two-year collaboration with the Frankendael Foundation in Amsterdam. His practice is grounded in a rethinking of the experience of art along the lines of commitment and care.
