I Was Here, Tomorrow
I WAS HERE TOMORROW
Krinzinger Projekte, Schottenfeldgasse 45, 1070 Vienna
28 October – 9 November 2016 (opening 27 October)
I WAS HERE TOMORROW was a group exhibition made by twelve emerging international curators, myself included, with eight students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It was the final exhibition of Curators' Agenda: VIENNA 2016, a six-week curatorial residency run by the association BLOCKFREI in cooperation with the University. During the residency we explored the Viennese art scene, visiting studios, institutions and independent spaces. The third edition of the programme ended with this exhibition at Krinzinger Projekte, the project space of Galerie Krinzinger.
The exhibition looked at repetition as an artistic gesture. Each of the eight artists works through ongoing processes of adapting and manipulating, adding up small gestures and interventions until they build into something larger. Yet the finished object was never quite the point. Whatever these processes are working towards stays out of reach, always just beyond the horizon, which is where the exhibition's title comes from.
Repetition often suggests sameness. In these works it did the opposite. By repeating an image or an action, the artists drew attention away from the end product and towards the action itself. Their processes became rituals, bound up with time, consumption and identity. The artworks on display were what those rituals left behind: residues and evidence of the actions that produced them. Memory, in this reading, is not stored somewhere safe. It lives in bodies and materials, and it can be reshaped by what we do.
During the exhibition, image theorist, art critic and curator Klaus Speidel moderated an artist talk on Saturday 29 October. The talk expanded on the curatorial concept through the works on display.
Repetition, and what it reveals or erodes, is a thread that runs through my curatorial practice. It connects the looped gestures of Fallacy of Composition to the slow erasure of HOLD ON. HOLD ON. Working on I WAS HERE TOMORROWas part of a team of twelve was also a lesson in collective curating: the exhibition's argument had to be negotiated, repeated and reshaped among us before it could be put into the space.
Artists: Živa Drvarič, Stephan Genser, Gašper Kunšič, Anna Lerchbaumer, Sarah Pedde, Martin Schlögl, Marit Wolters, Hui Ye
Curators: Cima Azzam (PS/JO), Aviya Cohen (IL), Mahzabin Haque (BD), Liudmila Kirsanova (RU), Theresa Kneppers (US/GB), Adelina Luft (RO/ID), Erika Martin (CR), Raffaella M. Matrone (IT), Evelin Pál (HU), Lorena Parada (CO), Katarzyna Sobucka (PL/GB), Gabriele Tosi (IT)
Curators' Agenda: VIENNA 2016 was supported by the Federal Chancellery of Austria and the City of Vienna. Images courtesy of BLOCKFREI. Exhibition catalogue
