Elke Krystufek :
Installation For Grafenegg Schlosspark

While Marjetica Potrč integrated the view of the stately home into her work and works with the axis of the view, Elke Krystufek does the opposite: The Wall of Silence with the Door to the Best Kept Secret is the poetic title of this work. A narrow gravel footpath leads to a small door in a 16 metre long, 4 metre high and 30 centimetre thick reinforced concrete wall with graffiti painted onto both sides. "Mrs. Dr. Freude says" is written along the whole wall, and then "ausser der Sexualitätsstörung gibt es bei manchen Männern auch die Geldstörung." (Apart from the hang-up with sexuality some men also have a hang-up about money.) With her analytical gaze, Krystufek captures the institutional arena that she finds in Grafenegg and in the world at large on this clear minimalist sculpture: The park is not a zone of comfort for her, it is a threatening zone and a place of violence — a fear zone for women. The wall is threaded into the idyllic parkland setting as an irritation.
The Schloss, which Krystufek places herself in the way of, is proof of the hegemony of the political, economic, religious and cultural protagonists — who are, of course, male. Sigmund Freud, who has always been suspicious to feminists is as absent as the issues to be addressed in public space: social discrepancy, the distribution of power and erotic zones. Elke Krystufek's dominance of the space goes beyond the purely technical gaze: her space is always a space considered conceptually, a space that does not exist without its cultural background, that is structured by gender roles. She creates experiential zones where art can not merely be perceived in isolation but as a constituent element of life.
(Brigitte Huck)