° The Temporary Zones

January 10th – February 9th, 2008

Project curator: Gulsen Bal

Participant artist
Ergin Çavuşoğlu
Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer
Nada Prlja


Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte opened recently its door to the public with The Temporary Zones a stimulating first project developed by the founder and director of Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Gulsen Bal. The exhibition offers a space for exploration of current relations of and in predicated conflict as well as negotiation within cultural specific conditions. In pointing out the space of current relations, the scope of the exhibition allows an engagement of a space that identifies the transitional conditions and the flows where the temporal construct seemingly obliterates all its secrets and ambiguities. In a journey of a volatile world, this gives a moment of magnitude by tracing the cross-border dialogues.

Each participating artist created works that respond in particular ways, to take a deeper look at complex relational powers with a new conjunction of transitions in a designated quasi-accessible space that resides within creative practice.

Ergin Çavuşoğlu is known for his lyrical and unsettling video installations that reconstitute our sense of space and pose questions about our understanding of place and identity in a globalised society marked by mobility.

His recent single channel video Empire (after Andy Warhol) reframes an ordinary building in reference to the representation of an iconicized structure, while shifting from the global to the local. Borrowing his title from Andy Warhol's film 'Empire', which consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building and runs 8 hours and 6 minutes and keeps the tracks of day to night, Çavuşoğlu’s video is both poetically engendering a visual anchor against taking deep breath to counter the effects of a metronomic flow that operates unsettling the concepts of domestic comfort through unrelenting gaze.

The Rights by Nada Prlja is a series of video recordings of children who are reading ‘European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom’ in the manner it presents that there is no protection of human rights and freedom. This exposes the complexity of the issues of immigration and the EU politics around the boundaries of “New Europe”.

Prlja creates a space that identifies the transitional conditions in between new topological zones of inclusion and exclusion through focusing on culturally specific conditions. The Rights provokes the potentiality of “who speaks” outside representational boundaries that define the conjuncture of social forces beyond its discursive construction.

In their work, Visiting Stalin, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer reflect upon cultural transformations of our contemporary world through exploring the potentials and effects of new social orders. Departing from sites of geopolitical conflicts and social confrontations they seek to extract the knowledge embodied by these new forms of socio-spatial organisation and group action. In doing so, they raise questions about how the emergence of networked cultures has changed our cultural forms of cohabitation and communication, and how we produce and experience the spaces we live in vis-à-vis a globalised world of flows.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a panel discussion took place at LABfactory to address the spaces of art production with the participating artist.

Sponsored and kind support provided by
Interkulturelle und internationale Aktivitäten
LABfactory
IB-Office Consulting

° About us
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am - 6pm
Admission free

Open Space
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
Schwedenplatz
1020 Wien
Austria

For more info please contact:  office@openspace-zkp.org