Exhibition in cooperation with AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich
Anca Bucur (RO), Veronika Dirnhofer (A)
Opening: 23. May 2023, 19h
Curatorial support: David Komary and Vasilena Gankovska
This year’s joint exhibition Impermanent by IG Bildende Kunst and AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich juxtaposes two artists who critically examine the topos of landscape and nature in their work. Beyond mere contemplation, which more often than not results in the authorial overestimation of the viewers and visual escapism, Veronika Dirnhofer and Anca Bucur search for a deeper understanding, indeed an ontological relationship with landscape and nature. While Dirnhofer essentially investigates her relationship to the world in and with pictures, that is in a painterly-processual as well as associative-imaginative way, Anca Bucur confronts the viewers with an installative structure that evokes a space of thought between the linguistic-discursive and the kinaesthetic-sculptural. At the same time, what both aesthetic practices have in common is that ultimately, they critically question political and economic interests and forces that manage, instrumentalize, or even exploit nature, or more precisely, land and natural resources.
The Romanian artist Anca Bucur, a guest at AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich in April and May, explores in her work the relationship between landscape, corporeality and labour against the backdrop of social and economic conditions. In Corporeal Red, an artistic research project spanning three years, the artist takes the viewer to a bauxite waste pond near the Danube Delta in Romania, which exemplifies the routines of bauxite extraction and the over-exploitation of nature by the aluminium production industry. In an installation comprising a video essay, three panels of fabric, and objects made of recycled aluminium and ceramics, Bucur creates an artistic dispositif that invites not only a merely visual-documentary but also an essentially system-critical contemplation and analysis of the exploitation of that precarious, indeed ruined landscape. Beyond the examination of purely regional conditions in Eastern Europe, Bucur directs the gaze to an extractive capitalist system that has been operating transnationally for a long time, utilising and unscrupulously exploiting the landscape and nature in a neo-imperialist and economically hierarchical way.
The paintings and ceramics of the Austrian artist Veronika Dirnhofer recur to the notion of landscape in a number of ways. They are, however, least of all concerned with depiction or the creation of a pictorial-contemplative opposite. Instead, Dirnhofer conceptualizes the picture from within, processually derived from the layers of the pictorial body, but also imaginative-associatively as a mesh of semantic charges that result from the interplay and interference of heterogeneous, often collage-like image layers. In this emphatically processual, intuitive, and thoroughly non-linguistic evocation of landscape-like textures and layerings, the subject is not subjectivism, but, rather critically, an altered relationship to nature, to the world. Dirnhofer asks, always against the backdrop of the current political and economic conditions, for a non-hierarchical and non-instrumentalising conception of nature that not only seeks to create a deeper connection but also appreciatively, at eye level, essentially cares for its preservation.
In Impermanent, Anca Bucur and Veronika Dirnhofer deconstruct the essentialist notion of nature as existing on its own terms and more or less continuously regenerating itself. Beyond a contemplative notion of landscape, which runs the risk of additionally suggesting disposability through the medium of the (distancing) gaze, the artists pursue a reciprocal as well as relational understanding of the relationship to nature. In an artistic sense, both positions presented in Impermanent also reveal an “impermanent”, transient moment in the form of a certain aesthetic openness and polysemy, which, however, does not aim at simple imagination or even visual pleasureableness, but challenges viewers to an active and critical engagement.
Text David Komary
English translation Martin Wimmer
www.ancabucur.net