A New Vision of Debris
Contemporary photo-collage & photomontage
Opening: Friday, 21 June 2019, at 7pm
21 June – 19 July 2019
In recent years, we have seen a strong rise in interest in the collage among artists, especially in the photographic medium. If the collage had been considered a peripheral art until the advent of avant-garde art, it was in its time established as a discontinued tradition and as a metaphor for a modern, accelerated life. In particular, with Bauhaus it becomes equivalent to other artistic practices. Since today we are more than ever surrounded by the reproduction of reproduced, transformed and processed copies of digital imaging waste, creating a collage medium is a more logical phenomenon. Contemporary artists using collage do not merely stem from the fascination of its aesthetic value, but rather from the fact that this technique illustrates today’s (chaotic, oversized) time and offers certain perspectives on art and the world.
The exhibition will present the works of artists, linked by a similar way of thinking. Their work is characterized by the fact that they form a dialogue between the present and the past, while at the same time they deal with the issues of the border of the media themselves. Some, for example, borrow fragments of individual works of art that have subscribed to pop culture, and at the same time explore interrelations between the sacred and the profane. They explore relationships between a copy and an original in a way of continuous and ubiquitous reproduction, where the copies are losing contact with the original, which thus becomes irrelevant. Some of the selected authors encroach upon old photos, slides, prints and illustrations published in newspapers, which are often processed earlier. All these processes are changing into the process of deconstruction, changing the scope and creating a new order and space, which allows searching for new meanings.
In the project, we will dedicate, on the one hand, the “conventional” photo-collage and photomontage, which arises as a physical or digital activity of the artist, where it is therefore “cutting”, “gluing” and “imaging” in order to create a new image. On the other hand, we will explore practices where the “collage / montage process” is going on at the conceptual and conceptual level. The “New Vision of Debris” project will present a wide range of approaches and methods in contemporary art that uses “photo-collage”.
The project is being developed internationally in cooperation with the Fotogalerie Wien.
Participating artists:
Alexandra Baumgartner, Caroline Heider, Herbert Hofer, Marko Lipuš, Lilly Lulay, Iosif Kiraly, Kensuke Koike, Zuzana Pustaiova, Anita Witek and Metka Zupanič
The exhibition is supported by:
