25.11.2011 – 26.02.2012

Opening: Thursday, November 24, 2011, 7pm
with a lecture/performance “Things that leave me sleepless” by Gernot Wieland at 8pm

The lecture/performance will be repeated in English at the exhibition closing on February 26, 2012 at 4 pm.


The current group exhibition signals the start of the second phase of the OSLO10 program. Following temporary, one-off events held inside and outside of the exhibition space, a series of solo and group exhibitions will take place from November 2011 until October 2012. The exhibition HOTAVANTGARDEHOTHOT bears the same title as that describing the two-year-long program of OSLO10.

The group show addresses the linguistic and social attributes of the avant-garde and its significance today. In the history of the visual arts, the avant-garde refers to the artistic movements that occurred at the start of the 20th century, and is inseparable from the discourse on modernity. Since the end of the 20th century, the term “avant-garde” has become especially fashionable within the culture industry: it is often used in describing new brands or certain lifestyles. Has the movement of art going forward, in search of new territories, become obsolete, and/or has its vanguard gone elsewhere today?

In contemporary artistic production, the notion of the avant-garde appears most prominently in critical or ironic observations and references. What unites the artists represented in this exhibition is their non-hierarchical treatment of available cultural material. They appropriate it by repeating pre-existing works (Karl Holmqvist, Reto Pulfer), shift its perception through radical fragmentation (Agnieska Brzezanska, Adriana Salazar Arroyo) and alter its meaning by changing its format. They use the aesthetics and techniques of arts and crafts, scientific exposition and applied art and question the value and relevance of the artwork today (Karl Holmqvist, Gernot Wieland, Amelie von Wulffen). The old avant-garde utopias no longer seem appropriate for the times – the wish for change and the attack on existing norms, however, has not yet been lost. Hence the monuments appear in several works, as symbols of established and rigid dogmas – as fragments of a failed ideology in the work of Adriana Salazar Arroyo, and as the means of creating a new identity and a new historical awareness in the works of Aleksandra Dominic and Gernot Wieland.

Today, the realization and implementation of forward movements have become subtler and the abandonment of what has become a historical concept of the “avant-garde” reflects a democratization of the art system. Contemporary artists now have numerous channels of distribution and communication at their disposal and the access to art and its comprehension is no longer limited to a small few. Thus artists such as Aleksandra Domanovic reflect the distribution and production possibilities of the electronic media and use it systematically for their own works. In this sense, the exhibition HOTAVANTGARDEHOTHOT reflects on the intermediate state both for and against the avant-garde(s) and presents individual reflections on its accomplishments, its influence as well as its failure.


Opening hours:
THU – SAT, 2pm – 6pm
closed: 23.12.2011 - 04.01.2012

Finissage:
12.02.2012, 4pm

Supported by:
Christoph Merian Stiftung, Migros-Kulturprozent, videocompany.ch, Tweaklab

Thank to:
Appenzeller Bier

Image credit:
Amelie von Wulffen, Ohne Titel, 2010. Courtesy the artist & Kunstverein Braunschweig.

Please note:
Karl Holmqvist – Reading “The Sun Shines for Everyone”: Wednesday, December 21, 2011, 7 pm, Kunsthalle Zurich


Agnieszka Brzezanska (*1972, Gdansk, Poland; lives in Warsaw and Berlin)
Agnieszka Brzezanska works in the mediums of painting, photography, collage and film, and explores themes which, with precise observations of western popular culture, make reference to the historic avant-garde. With her examinations of astronomy, cosmology and theosophy, she alludes to strategies of figurative delimitation as seen in the work of avant-garde artists Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin and Emma Kunz, who did not treat geometric abstraction as formalism, but rather a means of structuring philosophical, scientific and spiritual ideas. Brzezanska often presents her works in cross-media installations. The diverse media come together with issues of social change through technical innovation, focusing on the ambivalent relationship between technology and spirituality. The artist prefers working with information channels such as YouTube, with the iPad or iPhone, intentionally using various lo-fi methods and shunning technical perfection.
In Dharma TV (2005), a filmic remix of television images, Brzezanska addresses the universal fear of the apocalypse. The film focuses on abstract, analogue images that slowly build up or dissipate, pixel by pixel, during the switch from one channel to another. Religious and esoteric shows, advertisements for telephone sex as well as worldwide news programs are edited together in a rapid array of threatening allure. The arrangement of images and their simultaneous dissipation evokes the oppressive atmosphere that in apocalyptic visions often accompanies the decline of social order. Similar to Brzezanska’s motifs of space, an infinitely, nearly unfathomable dimension of information transfer is reflected. The flood of images makes clear that there are no longer ideological certainties and that a fear of loss of meaning and chaos steadily reigns in the immaterial world of data transmission. At the end of the film, explosions and catastrophes from Hollywood films such as Independence Day mix with a romantic dance scene from a teen film, accompanied by the song Pull up the People (2005) by the English-Sri Lankan singer M.I.A. Using iconic images of civilization’s destruction and visual overload, Brzezanska stages a purification process: with passion and irony, an apocalyptic point zero is created, which, as with the artists of the avant-garde, might stand for energy as well as revived ingenuity.

Aleksandra Domanovic (*1981 in Novi Sad, Slovenia; lives in Berlin)
For Aleksandra Domanovic, electronic media is a theme as well as a tool. The artist uses the Internet as an instrument; a channel of distribution and the subject of her research on changes in society and the media. In her video essay Turbo Sculpture (2010), Domanovic addresses a tendency in public art in former Yugoslavia. Due to the lack of sufficient reference points or a younger history, monuments to heroes of pop culture have been erected in many places, especially in Serbia. Meters-high statues of Bruce Lee, Bob Marley or Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) now assist with a new construction of morals and identity. In line with well-known phenomena of postwar Eastern Europe such as Turbo TV, Turbo Architecture and Turbo Folk, Domanovic has called this development in art in public space Turbo Sculpture. Like much of her work, Turbo Sculpture can also be seen at the artist’s website, where it is also possible to download 19:30 free stack (2010). When printed on A4 paper and stacked, the PDF document becomes a sculpture. The printed edges revealed on the stack’s side depict abstract fragments of a macro photograph of Ecstasy pills. References to the techno movement are a frequent element in Domanovic’s work: for the young postwar generation in former Yugoslavia, techno played a unifying role, helping to shape identity. Most of Domanovic’s works are publicly available at blogs, on YouTube or at techno parties that she has organized. Together with three other artists, she also runs the blog at vvork.com, where images of art works, including only the title and the artist’s name, are posted daily. vvork.com is an archive as well as an ongoing digital exhibition and is now one of the most frequently visited blogs of artists and curators of a younger generation.

Karl Holmqvist (*1964 in Vasteras, Sweden; lives in Berlin)
Karl Holmqvist works with language-based collages, and other more experimental formats such as performance readings, artist's books and room-size installations. Large parts of his work typically consist of 'quotes' taken from a variety of often unexpected sources and recombined into constellations of new, possible meaning. He makes use of rhythm and repetition in order to have viewers and/or listeners be transported between moments of recognition and discovery. The act of redoing something in fact is a repetition in itself, and the notion of the original as understood in the modernist tradition seems to have less relevance to a practice where everything can be repeated and reused anew. Beginning with combining the very letters of the alphabet to form new words, phrases and meanings, taking language itself as a form of ready-made. The exhibited group of collages take as departure the Wiener Secessionists from late 19th century Vienna, and their idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the merging of art and life, and a variety of creative expression such as music, architecture and design. In the collages thus we find recombinations in cut-out photocopies of diverse elements such as the designs of Wiener Secessionist Josef Hoffman (1870-1956) with advertising material for a collection of watches by the Italian designer duo Dolce & Gabbana; the artist refers to pop icon Grace Jones and quotes the late Amy Winehouse, famous not only through her music but also her style of fashion.

Adriana Salazar Arroyo (*1981, Costa Rica; lives in Amsterdam and Berlin)
In her 16mm film Found Cuban Mounts (2010) Adriana Salazar Arroyo presents a structural representation of memory. The film documents the artist’s trip from Havana to the Sierra Maestra and ends at the pier where in 1956 young revolutionaries arrived in Cuba. Salazar Arroyo embarks on the reverse route by which Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and shows the post-revolutionary monuments and memorials that may be found along the route. In Salazar Arroyo’s film, the motif of the monument, which serves as a representative as well as a repository for ideologies, is methodically dismantled and is presented literally in fragments. With the demolition of the monuments that were often built for eternity, the film offers a different representation of the Communist revolution’s claim to power and the failure of its utopias. The structure and rhythm of Salazar Arroyo’s film are based on excerpts from Fidel Castro’s famous four-hour-long speech History Will Absolve Me from 1953. Each letter of the speech corresponds to an individual filmic image; for each word, a different camera angle is used.
For many artists of the avant-garde, the radicalism of revolution was a key metaphor for their art: they saw themselves in opposition to traditional and academic notions, which closely linked the wish for a social revolution with the avant-garde and its quest for decisive change and the destruction of previous artistic forms. In Salazar Arroyo’s film, a forward movement is starkly slowed down and disassembled into its individual parts. The process of alienation disregards the content of Castro’s ideology and uses the tectonic structure of the monuments as an occasion to portray the process of construction as well as decline of the Cuban revolutionary movement. The projection surface, in the format of an A4 page, underlines the link to language and the pages of a book, which is also revealed in the structuring of the images in the rhythm of the turn of a page. The metal construction reiterates the frames and mesh structures that are frequently documented in the film, which are often found in the urban areas surrounding Havana.

Reto Pulfer (*1981, Bern, Switzerland; lives in Berlin)
In his artistic vocabulary, Reto Pulfer constructs systems of signs and meanings in which texts, fabrics, sculptures, performances and music come together in a coherent whole. Pulfer refers to his works as “states” that describe a moment of transition and transformation. This agility is also evident in the selection of his materials, which includes paper, fabric and clothing. Pulfer sews together found textiles, combining them into new surfaces and constructions, sometimes with zippers, visible seams or protrusions with underlying wood. The recurring color of water – blue, turquoise or green – is also important, representing liquidation and evaporation. Pulfer is an autodidact who developed his work methods outside the realms of art school. In a series of modernist pastels that reiterate forms and figures from Cubism, Constructivism and Expressionism, he shows a starting point of his artistic career, in which he appropriated and translated Modernist classics. These works were created in Arlesheim and at the artist’s studio in Münchenstein between 1999 and 2000. Also included in the exhibition is the invitation card for Pulfers very first exhibition at the exhibition space ximo43, Feldbergstrasse in Basel in 2001. Already in these early works, the interplay between impotence, failure and artistry can be recognized – the moment of proof and the calculation of possible other forms is central to Pulfer’s work. The condition of uncertainty and quiet references in Pulfer’s works reveal a self-referential grammar that is reminiscent of abstract poetry. The artist makes a point to disclose his creative processes, such as the formulation of his compositions in texts or scripts, making them an integral part of his spatial installations.

Gernot Wieland (*1968 in Horn, Austria; lives in Berlin)
Gernot Wieland creates a system of order and narration in his works, using various forms of storytelling. His installations are often comprised of drawings, text or videos that pursue a story on various levels and which take a surprising course. In doing so, Wieland brings together his own kind of “scientific” approach with memories and fictions. An important aspect of this are his lecture/performances, which present a fascinating mixture of stories, reports, personal recollections and scientific data. Accompanied by projections the lecture/performances follow associative narrative structures and are characterized by a gripping, poetic sobriety: “Wieland knows how to arouse emotion in his audience. His lecture/performances relate personal stories and it does not play a role whether or not they are his own. What is important is that they are credible and that they tell us something.” (Gigiotto del Vecchio). Gernot Wieland has written a lecture/performance especially for OSLO10 examining the avant-garde, in which the plotlines develop from the desire for something new to the significance of heroes. For the lecture/performances he also creates drawings, a kind of mind map as well as small sculptures that can be seen as idea-generating sketches, as illustrations or as a further level of the entire narrative system.

Amelie von Wulffen (*1966, Breitenbrunn, Germany; lives in Berlin)
Amelie von Wulffen works with collage and watercolor. She addresses private and collective memory in her painting-photo montages, expanding them into free choreographies and imaginative scenarios that remain consistently incomplete. Her visual language, which results from the hybridity of photography and painting, is further enriched by the inclusion of quotations from pop culture or classical art masterpieces. The images also assume the angles of filmic camera movements, in which visual fragments flow into one another and perspectives of spaces and interiors open up into simultaneous sequences.
With a series of 46 watercolor paintings from 2010/2011, Amelie von Wulffen has created a work group that is new and surprisingly different from her previous work: cartoon figures of vegetable, fruits, sausages and tools depict brief narrative scenes addressing issues such as education, morality, and rules of interpersonal conduct. The images are reminiscent of children’s books from the 1950s that the artist found at her grandmother’s home and which often use humorous pictures to convey moral values. Von Wullfen’s comics, however, are not necessarily intended for children: they often reveal a latent tension, trauma or act of violence or sexuality. The title of the series This is How it Happened derives from an etching from Francisco de Goya’s Desastres de la guerra and thus subtly includes a metaphor of war. The cartoon images may also be read as biting and ironic commentary on the economic impact on the current art market: by consciously depicting applied art, dilettantism and naïveté, they raise questions of sincerity and the ideal and material value of an art work. In a further watercolor series (all from 2011), von Wulffen brings together the formal language of comics and caricature with that of portraiture and historical painting. While the green head is reminiscent of the surreal portraits by René Magritte or Philip Guston, the flying books reference the drawing style of book designer and painter Celestino Piatti. The watercolors subtly integrate references from art history as well as 19th century children’s books, Pompeian painting and the works of Delacroix, Arcimboldo and van Gogh. Von Wulffen counters hierarchies, categorizations and prevailing issues of genre with humor and emotional directness.