2023-06-01 14:11:32
An exhibition of international video works in the Stadtgalerie Lehen places a question mark on the term “landscape”.
Contemporary art is currently enlivening the landscape in the Lungau: the installations, performances, guided tours and tours of the ten-day Supergau Festival can be experienced until Sunday. At the same time, landscape is entering the art space in Salzburg: Stadtgalerie Lehen shows how contemporary artists deal with the often idealized term.
The question mark in the title already reveals that this discussion does not dwell on idyllic images: “Landscape?” is the name of the show designed by guest curator Claus Friede. Landscape is not a topic for nostalgics, the art expert writes in the catalogue, it can also be “a precise metaphor for the ecological, psychological, social, political, historical and digital conflicts of our time”.
In the three-and-a-half-minute video work “Water Fields” by Austrian artist Lisa Truttmann, what might only look like meditative water features quickly turns out to be a strict view of huge agricultural areas in California, where, in view of the progressive drought, something can only thrive with massive use of artificial irrigation. Not the land, the rights to the water are the most important asset. Other works in the exhibition that opened on Thursday also deal with the contrasts between idealized imagination and reality, says Gabriele Wagner, director of the Stadtgalerie. The US artist Ross Constable went back to the place of his childhood, to the city of Cairo in the state of Illinois, which is now considered a run-down “ghost town”. On two parallel screens set at right angles to each other, he shows vast fields and abandoned buildings, flooding and anti-racism marches. A dead deer lies in a field. A wolf also roams the picture.
The gallery director reports that Gabriele Worgitzki locates her “construction site of the imaginary” in a different “field of tension between town and country”. With a pinhole camera, Worgitzki took blurred photographs of residential areas on the outskirts of town and assembled them into a video installation. It’s regarding “the promise of life in your own house,” which often includes “ready-made life concepts,” says Worgitzki in the catalogue.
The exhibition, Gabriele Wagner sums up, “can also stimulate people to think regarding their own ideas regarding the city, country and landscape.”
Exhibition:“Landscape? International video art on the urbanization of landscape”, Salzburg, Stadtgalerie Lehen, until July 29th
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