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On July 5th, 2007, we received the invitation
from the Salzburg gallery Galerie 5020 to make a selection from all the
submissions for the 2008 programme. A challenge and an honour! Yet, which
course of action to take? How to form an exhibition from the approx. 160
submissions? But in fact the answer to these questions had already been
concisely pre-formulated in Ms Hildegard Fraueneder's email: … " indeed,
it should be about filtering out on which issues artists are preferably
working at the moment, what concerns they're having, which formats they're
working in. It is less about a selection guided by content principles
but about a feel for up-to-date art production." Following these directions
we have selected 4 individual artists and one collective whose works,
artistic strategies and content focus we regard as truly up-to-date.
But who is Mira? And what does she have to do with the exhibition? The
exhibition's title takes up the initial sentence of Dimitré Dinev's debut
novel Engelszungen [Angels' Tongues], published by Deuticke in 2003, and
slightly alters it: Miro is turned into Mira. Dimitré Dinev lumps together
different realities in this initial phrase: 1. Miro. A male first name
that together with the author's name defines a certain cultural context;
2. mobile phone. The mobile represents the contemporary world in this
sentence but it can also be seen as a symbol for the apparent overcoming
of distance. 3. Wings = angels. In the very first sentence the book's
plot is presented as something that cannot be grasped with our five senses
alone.
The meanings that can be extracted from this one short sentence can be
applied to the works of art presented in this exhibition. Among other
things these works of art try to get at the bottom of situations of everyday
life, they play with identities and stereotypes, deal with feminist positions,
with contemporary communication culture and, eventually, with nothing
less than an analysis of our society of the spectacle.
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