For her installation at the new Viola Park Secondary School in Vienna, a school with a dedicated focus on ball sports, Miriam Bajtala draws on her own background as a competitive athlete. Her piece explores the idea of competitiveness in sports and challenges our concepts of winning and losing by contrasting conventional notions of performance with other, non-measurable qualities. Entitled First Prize (for possible, non-measurable qualities), her work is a statement: witty, conceptual, delicate and bold. It unfolds as a narrative across different spaces in the school, weaving a temporal and thematic arc that juxtaposes past and present in sport, while envisioning a future of (im)possible prizes that open new potentials.
Bajtala’s piece is a continuation of an ongoing project she first initiated in 2011. In it, she rededicated more than 20 of the trophies she herself had won as an athlete and transferred them to the art system. Eleven of these prizes remained unassigned and now form the narrative backdrop for her three-part intervention at the school:
Bajtala takes the idea of “deconstructing victory” literally, breaking the trophy, as a symbol of winning, down into its constituent components. Hundreds of upside-down trophy bases are affixed to the ceiling in the entrance area, forming a minimalist sculptural element. In the school auditorium, a triptych of photographic prints on glass shows the dismantled trophies in their individual parts. Accompanying this, a wall text lists eleven prizes for potential, non-measurable qualities – highlighting values that are not generally associated with conventional notions of performance. Another part of the work is a discursive format: a podcast featuring interviews with students, former elite athletes and experts, in which they share their personal stories from competitions and reflect on the utopian potential of prizes and recognition. The podcast episodes can be accessed by scanning QR codes posted around the school.