links: www.labiennale.at Venice Biennale 2011 Austria on Facebook  

txt: Commissioner's Statement

 

In his Venice project, Markus Schinwald examines the Austrian Pavilion built 1934 by Josef Hoffmann, an architectural landmark in and around the Giardini district. Markus Schinwald, who scored success with complex installations he realized mainly in museums and art institutions outside Austria, as for example in Zurich, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Budapest, has a comprehensive oeuvre to show for, with his works combining performative with painterly, sculptural, filmic and architectural elements. With subtlety and finesse, Schinwald explores dispositifs of control, disciplining, and self-improvement, which inscribe themselves in the human body, shaping and pervading it to re-emerge on the body surface as psychologically charged inner worlds, visible and palpable. This approach also makes itself felt in his Biennale contribution: the viewer turns into a performer, the pavilion into a closed stage. By dissecting the interior space along vertical axes, a new mode of perception emerges which makes the human body its structural frame of reference: “Although these constructional components are of course architectural elements, it suggested itself to use psychoanalytical terms for a concise definition; after all, the space created is dissociative rather than than actually fragmented: claustrophobic above and nothing below. Or, if you will, the mind in neurosis, the crotch in psychosis. However, unlike in the spatial sculptures of Bruce Nauman or Robert Morris, the space intervention is not an autonomous act here, but also a kind of stage system or environment for the display of different works. It is, for one thing, an attempt to establish various different elements and, at the same time, to avoid explicit categorizations through contrastive positioning”, Markus Schinwald explains.

 

video: Approaching Venice - Jörg Heiser