An exhibition by students of the Department of Site-specific Art, University of Applied Arts Vienna. 

With contributions by Rosa Andraschek, Christian Christiansen, Lara Erel, Natalia Gurova, Konstanze Horak, Sissi Petutschnig, Michael Plessl, Julian Siffert, Anna-Sophia Unterstab, Tsai-Ju Wu. Developed within the course held by Georgia Holz.   

Museums and collections are stores of our cultural memory, but they seem to have come into crisis in our digitized age. They are places of exposure, but at the same time they practice extensive prohibitions on contact and deprive things of their original function.

As part of regular field trips to museums and collections in Vienna, in this course we investigated the epistemological effects of things and objects as a result of their museum aestheticization, institutionalization and classification and how they can oppose these mechanisms. To what extent can artistic strategies act as productive disruptive factors in collections and archives to address the agency of things, break with hegemonic narratives and make voids productive.

Cities are designed at large, and within the urban fabric, art is ever-present. While certain artistic works are deeply anchored in a city’s collective awareness and thus enjoy public attention — in Vienna, Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial at Judenplatz, for instance — others go almost unnoticed, or aren’t easily identified as artwork. Among these are interventions that often only temporarily, or compositions that subtly inscribe themselves into an urban context — a row of façades painted in the colours of Euro banknotes at Wiedner Gürtel, for instance, Projekt 2 für Erste Campus by Marcus Geiger.

The removal and destruction of Lawrence Weiner’s word sculpture SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT) due to modernisation and expansion measures to the flak tower in Esterhazy Park which the artwork had adorned since 1991, turning the site into a city landmark, and the passionate debate that followed prompts the sensitive issue of what to do with artworks conceived and produced specifically for a site when the site itself is subject to change.
How can these works be saved, archived, collected? Or, lacking their original context, have they become obsolete altogether? Can they be transferred into a new context, and if so, how?

On weekly field trips, we visited prominent and less known examples of public art and art in architecture, explored various types of buildings and sites and, the above-mentioned topics on mind, we viewed these situations from the angles of limitedness and mutability, between conservation, change, and deterioration.  

This zine consists of 10 posters drafted and designed by the participants of the course, reflecting our insights and discoveries. Yu Isogawa, Miki Okamura, and Felix Schwentner designed an overview poster, providing basic information for a selection of sites we had visited. In a podcast, Ana Mumladze sheds a light on public art in Vienna and, among other things, the afterlife of artworks when their surroundings change profoundly. The trip to the Memorial at the site of the former Concentration Camp in Gusen, and tour through the tunnel system “Bergkristall” are reflected in posters by Rosa Andraschek and Oskar Enetjärn, while Gregory Desneux focuses on the disputed “Continents” faiences by Maître Leherb in the former University of Economics; Bart Houwers was inspired by Werner Würtinger’s intervention on the glass façade of the Technical University, “24 Stunden glühen” [Glowing around the clock], making it appear at all times to be reflecting a warm sunset. Our visit at Erste Campus, where director Kathrin Rhomberg gave us a tour and an introduction to the Collection, induced Mariya Tsaneva to take a closer look at art in architecture in her homeland, Bulgaria. Ilena Sophia Trump was intrigued by Olafur Eliasson’s Yellow Fog and dedicates her poster to this work, while the impression Karl Prantl’s untitled stone sculpture located next to the Juridicum law school building made and left with her came as quite a surprise to Sissi Petutschnig. Nevertheless, she drew on its weird appearance, mirroring its organic shape in her poster. Kim Gubbini and Emma Kaufmann-LaDuc’sposter is informed by their interest in the presence of the female figure in public space, while Elizaveta Kapustina blurred a number of impressions taken with a micro-camera on our field trips into an almost abstract composition.