9 Sept 2007 to 17 Oct 2007
Curator Amer Abbas
Opening Reception: Sunday, Sep 9, 2007, 7 pm
The Townhouse Gallery
10 Nabrawy street
off Champollion street
Cairo
Downtown Cairo
Egypt
Middle East
p: +2 02 2576 8086
m:
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w: www.thetownhousegallery.com
One year ago, five Vienna-based artists, Susi Jirkuff, Katrin Plavcak, Josef Dabernig, Hermann Huber and Constantin Luser travelled to Cairo where they faced an urban space that was very different from the cities they knew in the Western world. A complex blending of visual and aural sensations, Cairo is an environment that can be an exceptional experience when read as an artistic discourse.
The remapping of the city through the artists’ perceptions uncovered a mass of small stories behind the mega narratives of the metropolis. Using a variety of techniques they transformed these stories into artistic expressions and in doing so created filtered, individualized visuals of the city, which in turn rendered new understanding of the artists’ identities. The “Sound of Silence” shows these artists reflecting on their surroundings, and doing so in the context of sound disappearing and visual perceptions being left to dominate the mind.
The work of Josef Dabernig sometimes seems to be a sort of personal archaeology of modernity. It displays an admiration for the utopian and rational, but also a certain pleasure at gaps, mismatches and failures in such ideally conceived structures. He sees modernity as marked by contradictions and as heterogeneous in spite of its claims for universality. Admiration for the rational forms and structures of modernity and a certain obsession with them are always combined with an ironic and distanced attitude. (Igor Zabel, Individual Systems; La Biennale di Venezia, 50th International Art Exhibition, 2003) In his photographs of football stadiums and fields, this Austrian artist juxtaposes the purism of the geometry with the chaos of all that happens there over the course of time. The lives and personal histories that unfold in the stadium overgrow the abstract modernism in both West and East in a rank organic proliferation. (Thomas Edlinger, You’ll Never Walk Alone)
Constantin Luser uses drawing as an instrument to rapidly signify some of the visual material he has seen throughout his adult life, data collected to be output in room size gallery installations. He tries to make sense of the visual material consumed each day recycling lines created by things like network cables, window frames, aerials, light switches, power buttons, telecommunication masts. Lines and shapes made from the micro and macro technologies of modern life. Together they produce a map of an imagined domain for the viewer that challenge our perception of what is made visible and what is made invisible in society.
Susi Jirkuff’s series of short video loops contain movements of hands, feet or body; a collection of gestures, which mirror the way we move, or act, and the space we have or use. Initially, dealing mainly with emotions of fear or unease, the series took a different course of development and became an archive of daily performances, some of which common to all people, and others typical for special movie genres. The selection of animations, which will be shown during the “The Sound of Silence”, includes “belly dancing”.as an aesthetic reference and “hands with pills” as a universal gesture of having a choice.
Hermann Huber’s video-sound installation is a portrait of the Tiring department store on Attaba square, which was built in 1910 for the Austrian department store mogul Victor Tiring. During World War One, it was expropriated and since then it has changed hands many times.Today the building seems intact from outside, and inside it has been totally remodeled and converted into a home for sweatshops,squatters, workshops and a warehouse for street vendors.The video shows the normal workday activities in the building as well as the remains of the original architecture.
Katrin Plavcak is interested in inverted and double images. She explores the possibility of a democratic simultaneity of content and form in her paintings. In her murals, Plavcak treats issues like strangeness and black matter, and observes how the paintings deal with its surrounding.
Amer Abbas is the founder of Gallery Amer Abbas – Kunstbuero, which has exhibited the works of H. Mark, J. Strau, M. Geiger, U. Frei, Gelatin, J. Yang, A. Creischer, A. Siekmann and others. As a curator, Amer Abbas managed numerous exhibitions including Mini Art Fair/ Artklub , Vienna (1995), “Renée Green: The Digital Import/Export Funk Office” (1999); „Nada / shortcut“ by and (2000), “Kampfzone”. (2003). Amer Abbas, born in Baghdad, lives and works in Vienna.
