Spring at Grazer Kunstverein
8 March – 24 May 2019


Sylvia Schedelbauer
Collected Works 2004–2018


Sylvia Schedelbauer, still from Wishing Well, 2018.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Sylvia Schedelbauer produces experimental moving image works, that range from auto-biographical documentaries to visceral explorations of imagined scenarios. This exhibition is a largescale immersive passage through Schedelbauer’s entire oeuvre, bringing us from her most recent work Wishing Well, 2018 right back to her first work Memories, 2004.

Over the years Schedelbauer has developed her own unique cinematic structural language to interrogate themes such as cultural dislocation, what it means to be transnational, the slippery shifts between fiction and reality, and memory, as an unreliable but compelling insight into history. She uses narrative tools like dream logic, biography, allegorical collage, free association and storytelling to create highly engaging sensory experiences, that sometimes take years to complete. Her flickering filmic works stretch and accelerate the potential of found footage. Often working with source material such as orphan films – educational, industrial, amateur footage, home movies and newsreels – from archives or personal collections, Schedelbauer manipulates imagery to transform it into something totally new. In this way she inhabits existing material, bending it to her will to form an original narrative of her own (re)construction, creating new versions of a story every time.

Schedelbauer’s work is regularly screened at film festivals internationally. This exhibition marks her first solo show in a gallery context, and the first comprehensive exhibition of her complete works. The exhibition booklet will include a newly commissioned text by Alice Butler, Dublin-based film programmer, curator and co-director of aemi.

Event
Panel discussion in collaboration with Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film at 11am on Saturday 23 March 2019.

Sylvia Schedelbauer was born in Tokyo, and moved to Berlin in 1993 where she has been based since. She studied at the University of Arts Berlin (with Katharina Sieverding). Her films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage. Selected screenings include Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar and Stan Brakhage Symposium. Awards include the VG Bild-Kunst Award, the German Film Critics’ Award and the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film.


Triple Candie
The Culmination of Eighteen Months of Speculative Inquiry into the Anaphoric and Cataphoric Plays of a Situationist Aesthete: This Exhibition—which isn’t really about Narratology per se—Collects the Unfaithful Simulations, (Re)Articulations, and Interpolations Endeavored by Triple Candie, in Principled Reverence for the Deceased and Beloved American Artist Michael Asher (1943–2012)


Triple Candie, research image for If Michael Asher I, 2017.
Image courtesy of Triple Candie and Grazer Kunstverein.

Throughout 2018 and early 2019 Triple Candie (Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett) undertook a multi-layered research project investigating the work and legacy of the legendary American conceptual artist Michael Asher. Asher is well known for creating temporary installations in museum and gallery environments, often foregrounding the various hidden systems and assumptions that make art viewing possible. Triple Candie researched his oeuvre in order to understand and embody his production methodology, and to apply it, in a new and moderately theatrical way, to the specific context of the Grazer Kunstverein.

As part of the research project Triple Candie proposed multiple speculative installations, that were realised in a sequential seasonal rhythm throughout 2018. In practice, these installations were an attempt to resurrect the lost experiential potentialities of the work of an artist like Asher, asking ‘is it possible, through the speculative potential of arts practice, to reactivate expired gestures, in new or meaningful ways?’ Marking the culmination of this extensive research project, as part of the Spring Season we present a reprise of the first four installations, together with seven additional proposals that were previously unrealised. The exhibition will be documented with a forthcoming catalogue publication, contextualising the entire project.

Event
Editing session and public discussion with Triple Candie and invited guests on Friday 17 May 2019.

Triple Candie (Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett) is a US-based, avant-garde curatorial production agency that collaborates with museums and contemporary art spaces on exhibitions about art but generally devoid of it. From 2001 to 2010, it had a gallery in Harlem. Since then, it has presented projects in Australia, Europe, and the United States at such venues as Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, Deste Foundation, Athens, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City. Surveys of Triple Candie’s work have appeared at FRAC Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris (2012), and Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (2017).

This project was produced in collaboration with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art.


*CRK+ is a network of independent institutions in Graz whose common interest lies in the conveyance of contemporary art within an international context, formerly CMRK.