High Hills

Along the banks of the River Danube stood the abstract metal sculpture by the artist ANA. The form, which at first seemed rather amorphous, took its shape from that of a throne, as a primordial symbol of power, but also one of responsibility. With its glossily painted surface the sculpture played with equivalent present-day power symbols, which no longer include the concept of responsibility. Like a fetish, with rounded cheeks, a shiny black surface and fine white stripes, it told the story of the power which beautiful bodies and the idea of sexuality, or even of fast cars, exert over people. 

The conclusion, westwards along the banks of the River Danube, was formed by Cloed Baumgartner’s „Spitze“ (Lace). Painted enlargements of patterns of lace, aprons and dirndl bands extended across the Danube promenade from the ship moorings in the direction of the Wachau like a huge ornamental band through the landscape that looked like the luxuriously sweeping pleats of a skirt. People out walking were reminded of traditional regional dress and, associated with it, the history and role of women in this region. 

Ricarda Denzer’s photomontage „Fluchtweg“ (Escape Route) on the facade of the Kunsthalle Krems cut a fictive aisle through the building. As if through a pearl curtain, one looked down directly into the little courtyard with a surveillance tower lying behind the Kunsthalle, which borders onto the prison. It is a concealed public space, the official emergency escape route for museum visitors. Standing next to the wall in this courtyard there was a babble of voices to be heard coming from the prison side. One became aware of the fact that behind this wall was, and is, a separate universe going about its own business and its own work. That is what the artist was drawing attention to in an almost casual manner. With the view through the pearl curtain she fictively changed the co-ordinates, allowing the visitor to look out from what appears to be an interior space. By drawing attention to secondary scenes, which stand vicariously for a larger context, Ricarda Denzer makes concealed things visible to lethargic everyday eyes. These spaces become places of possible narratives, in which one's gaze can, if one is able to do so, be directed unimpeded towards the non-visible.

Mona Hahn tracks down the weak spots in public space, which vicariously represent social developments. And, vicariously for the need for action, she repairs them: in Krems she had noticed the ground surface of the car park opposite the Kunsthalle, which was bad for high heels. As in many cases, here too the devil is in the details, namely in the little holes in the paving stones, in which women’s high heels would get stuck as soon as they walked on them – demonstrating just how little scope the design of public space allows for the requirements of women. If equality means that a woman has to renounce certain attributes of her femininity in order to be able to move in a public space that has so many male connotations, then something must be wrong with that equality. So the artist filled the holes in the paving stones with synthetic granulates, in order to make it possible for ladies in high heels to walk on them, so demanding that equality should not be designed as just another form of subjugation. It is in this sense that one should understand her appeal 'Women, do not be practical!', which was to be seen on the sign of her unusual 'Women’s Car Park', as those the local authorities involved soon began calling the work.

The performance “Freiland” by Jasmin Ladenhaufen and Ingeborg Sumann is also all about fashion. The focal point of the show and of the video by Ingeborg Sumann was the significance of traditions in fashion and the rituals connected with them. As in a Cubist process, individual traditional elements were separated from their original context and put together again to make a new clothing creation. Behind this seemed to lie the desire to take the world apart, to view the individual elements and then put them back together in a new way.

Chiara Minchio’s contribution was a two-part photographic work which was sent out in the form of cards and distributed separately in several public places. She had already finished the work in the year 2000 and showed it to me in her studio in another context and at a time when the work of putting the exhibition together had actually already been completed. It immediately seemed to be clear that without the lightness of this piece of photography showing ladies’ high heels the exhibition would be missing something. With a smile, it presents a view of the sometimes touchingly silly efforts of human beings to declare the world of their own thoughts a generally valid universe. Not even Herr Freud, who was of the opinion that women wear high heels as a result of penis envy, would have been able to avoid smiling at this view of things. As in her painted pictures, the artist’s figures in the photographic works are victim and perpetrator in one, asexual mythical creatures which shed their burden in the deformations which are at times monstrous and absurd. And so a comic monster attempts to take its place on a high heel. With its naked behind, it is enthroned on it like an icon, filling up the picture. Then its head is balanced on this high heel, opening up the space for a story about someone who is in a room which, in its turn, is within a still larger room.

"Is fate anatomy?", asked the voice in Elisabeth Penker’s sound installation „legal crime“. The title is one of the artist’s designations for socially accepted or tolerated everyday infringements of rights and discrimination in relation to gender, descent and class. The boat moorings on the Danube seemed to be optimal for the installation. From the riverbank promenade it could only be heard in one particular area. There were no local residents. Nevertheless, the work had to be dismantled prematurely after complaints due to alleged noise pollution. Two sound channels carried a mix of verbal dialogues, noises and sound effects from the boat moorings across the water to the riverbank. "Will men be reduced to the simple function of reproduction?" "Do male social structures want to adapt?" The answer could be a homage to that which means "unprejudiced surrender to love", namely: "Complete me, maybe defeat me."

Proceeding from the individual fate of one woman, Renata Poljak took the issues upon which the exhibition was based as an opportunity to show the search for an understanding of the constant changes and overlapping to which the human being is subjected in life. The Croatian artist tells the story of fate as such, in which happiness and unhappiness are connected with one another in an unsentimental and impressive manner. In reduced pictures she presents the greatest moments of life in a simple way. That enables the true stories which she creates to take shape far behind our retinas. Her video „Today“ was shown in an old, abandoned butcher’s shop. One was able to see it from the street by looking in though the windows and hear it by putting on headphones. It told the story of the memories that inscribe themselves like a code in the bodies of human beings. At three different periods of her life, a woman always appears on her birthday. Moments of the past, present and future overlap and are presented in all their inevitability. In this sense the butcher’s shop also began to tell its own story. 

Laura Samaraweerová’s photographic works make use of fine gestures, but are not without biting irony. She plumbed the depths of people’s disturbed relationship to what is foreign and let it expose itself as the victim of its own prejudices by almost unnoticeably mixing together foreign and familiar moments and showing how nebulous the borders can be between understanding and not understanding. In the three large-scale pictures on the prison wall along Steiner Landstrasse transitional situations of understanding were created. The situations had an idiosyncratic surrealism of their own, because on the surface everything of course fitted together perfectly in this pretty little world. Yet the artist was deceiving us, the details did not belong together, not even the flowers were genuine. However the foreign element was not concealed in the details. It was hidden between them, in their connections: A man was sitting at a table with a decent-sized beer and exotic food, which he wants to eat using rubber gloves. Another person was sitting in front of the house, southern European style, waiting for people to speak to and using the public space as if it were his own private space. 

In his collages Konstantin Svestotschjotov likes to draw attention to paradoxes in social thinking. In Krems he offered us a view of the success of emancipation which is, as a matter of course, politically incorrect. He makes a woman in military trousers, sitting with a machine-gun in a pool of blood, say in her speech bubble: "That’s not menstruation." Bare-breasted and in the pose of a Renaissance Venus, the woman on the wall of the car park was both an object of lust and an enslaved warrior at the same time. With the words that he put in her mouth, the artist from Moscow was ironically referring to the explications of the Libyan Revolutionary Leader Muammar Al Gaddafi, who in his Third Universal Theory says that the difference between man and woman consists in menstruation, thereby making motherhood the actual function of female nature. That, he says, is where true freedom lies.