Art projects, June 2, 2023

ABSTRACT: Hannes Priesch will create an artistic installation/intervention under the title 'Hotel Abyss - Grund_Abgrund'. The exhibited objects consist of painted texts that are conceptually related to the symposium. As a starting point of his approach, the artist will take ideologically completely divergent definitions of terms, such as Frankfurt School, and create from them a visual intervention condensed with painterly means.

BIONOTE: Hannes Priesch (*1954 near Graz) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Max Weiler. He was a co-founder of the Viennese artist collective REM. In 1990 he received an artist-in-residence grant for Chicago from the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sports. He then remained in Chicago before moving to New York in 1995, where he maintained a studio in Brooklyn until 2016. He currently lives and works near Graz with his wife Herta Kramer-Priesch. His artistic focus is primarily on the critical examination of specific historical and contemporary texts.

ABSTRACT: The site-specific station performance invites participants on a pilgrimage through the immediate socio-economic topography of the conference environment. Participants can pause at about five stations and, by means of miniature performances by the artist Sarah Pogoda, playfully test or further think about questions of the conference on the basis of material reality as well as images of thought by Theodor W. Adorno (especially negative dialectics). Via their smartphones and headphones, participants can choose between three meditative soundtracks inspired by the Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, each of which accompanies and connotes their pilgrimage tour of and to Adorno in a different way.
The pilgrimage tour experiments with possibilities of embodied forms of critical theory, focusing on bodily experience through kinetic, audio-visual, and haptic stimuli and agents. By moving the pilgrimage tour into public space, we enable distinct systems of art (performance), theory, and everyday public life to meet. Out of this constellation emerges a liminal space-time that we want to use to contemplate together how critical theory can become lived practice, how cognition can become embodied, and how bodies can become an epistemic tool. At the same time, being exposed to life during the pilgrimage walk will allow for random disruptions and irritations of the flow, miniature performances, and meditation character. In this way, not only the cognitive agility of critical theory is tested, dialectical negativity becomes visible, but also the conversation that follows the pilgrimage tour is initiated, as each participant will be able to report on a different experience.
The multimedia station performance is site-specific, but based on the process-oriented aesthetic that the artist has been developing and testing since 2020 with the artist formation she founded, New Welsh Art Construction Organization (NWK-AO). Process-oriented art is less interested in an ontologically grounded work of art, but rather in antecedent experience and its epistemological possibilities in artistic activity. Such an understanding of art also breaks with common understandings of authorship, artistry, and creativity, and instead shows itself capable of connecting to the latest insights of New Materialism.

BIONOTE: Sarah studied German literature and history in Berlin and Vienna (1999-2005), and completed her doctorate on "Demiurgen in der Krise. Architektenfiguren in der Literatur nach 1945" (Berlin 2011). She was DAAD Lecturer at the University of Sheffield (UK) 2012-2016 and since 2016 she has been Senior Lecturer in German Studies at Bangor University (Wales). Her academic research focuses on the avant-gardes and epistemologies of art and research.
Since 2015 she has been developing artistic research projects, mainly happenings, actions and interventions in the public space, such as Bellotograph (2015, Sheffield) and The Redundancy (2019, Bangor). In 2020 she co-founded the art formation Neue Walisische Kunst-Aufbauorganisation (NWK-AO) - a fluid group of artists exploring the Avant-garde today.