Graf / Schlegel / Wakolbinger

With Franz Graf, Eva Schlegel and Manfred Wakolbinger, the FOTOHOF presents three visual artists of the middle generation, in whose multimedia work photography plays an important role. Their joint presentation shows the strand of artists’ photography (“art as photography“) that is so important for the development of the medium, as exemplified by Peter Weibel and Peter Weiermair, among others, as early as the late 1970s.

Franz Graf has repeatedly dealt with photography in his diverse visual work. Very early on (in collaboration with Brigitte Kowanz), he created experimental treatments of SX 70 Polaroid images – an analog form of photography that is still fascinating today. At FOTOHOF he presents a series of Polaroid portraits of his students and of people who attended his class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna between 2000 and 2006. He adds on the white border of the Polaroid material – the names of the photographed persons as if as a graphic ornament. The attribution of identity on the basis of portrait photos is made a subject and questioned by the special formal quality of the Polaroid material in connection with the characters. Individual Polaroids are used by the artist as models for large-format portrait drawings; in their entirety, the multi-part work becomes a collective portrait of a generation that is stripped of temporality by the pale (threatened with extinction) medium of the instant photograph.

In recent years, Eva Schlegel has repeatedly dealt with flying and falling as metaphors for success and failure – most recently in her large personal exhibition “In Between“ at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Flying, in the sense of overcoming gravity, of detachment, is at the same time a synonym for the risk of unsecured falling, of falling. For the exhibition in the FOTOHOF she shows examples of her large-format silkscreens printed on lead, a material that is at the same time extremely heavy and soft and which, just like the motif of hovering between heaven and earth, can be translated into the polarity of failure and success. An impression of the ephemeral and fleeting is offered by a room with mirrors attached to the ceiling. Here, space is perpetuated and dissolved. In the fragmentation of the room, the floor is no longer concretely graspable – perception is put to the test. This uncertainty also mirrors that of falling and flying. Dissolution and immateriality are reflected in Eva Schlegel’s work through the use of glass and other transparent materials.

Manfred Wakolbinger shows his film “Galaxies 1-4“ and photographs that are the basic material for the film animations. They are underwater shots of vertebrate species, which the artist associates with science fiction in their visual quality.
The film is a reminiscence of his all-time heroes: Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch and the mountain people of the Toraja in Central Sulawesi. Wakolbinger photographs pelagic sea squirts in the waters of Indonesia, which at a certain stage of development are related to mammals and thus to humans. He thereby establishes a connection to the Torajans, whose founding myth is about a spaceship that brought them to earth ages ago and with which they return to their ancestral people in space after death.
The soundtrack developed by Christian Fennesz for this film decisively enriches the film with a new level.