STWST New Art Contexts: Tanja Brandmayr, Mathias Schlägel

New aggregate states: 2 installations

STWST upstairs
Part of Exhibition: open throughout

2 independently created works are placed in relation to each other.

Fog Ballet - Tanja Brandmayr

As art and theory research, Nebelballett (Fog Ballet) addresses the equation of actor, medium, and network. A body in a loop of movement is projected onto drifting and condensing wisps of fog. While the fog passes through diffuse states and thus becomes a space-filling element and actor in its own right, a body attempts to manifest itself on the fog. Something disappears. Something manifests itself. Something manifests itself in its disappearance. The Fog Ballet moves in this paradoxical state. Haunting networks, tech fog boxes, and swallowed remnants of human ideas: a sculptural-dynamic assertion that imagines its own dissolution. This interplay can also be read as a dramatic reversal of an “assertion by a human actor”: not only in the fictionality of “asserting something,” but simply as (self-)assertion—in the sense of a refusal to disappear.

Screens also draw the eye magnetically. They become residual noise and the flickering of reality, the anthropological constant of a campfire. The blaze that glows for us also references the overheating of the globe. The atmosphere and oceans have become storage media for heat. We sit by the fire.

GLUT - Mathias Schlägel

Primeval television,
thoughts take place around the fire,
air vibrates,
sparks ignite the darkness,
eyes organize flames, relaxation.

Mathias Schlägel, lives and works in Linz. Using interdisciplinary strategies and found materials, he creates excursions into the disciplines of fine art. Primarily in the field of experimental film, but also in sculpture and painting. The boundaries between the individual genres are deliberately explored in order to evoke interactions between and within their contents.

Tanja Brandmayr (AT) is an artist and author and has been working for many years in various contexts between art, text, media and staging. Her art and context research Quasikunst thematizes coordinate systems, degrees of pollution and a collapse of opposites. Other preferred themes: Separation, dissolution, dynamics and the AgensMovens behind things. The examination of text and body as so-called “first media” led to numerous projects in the context of art after the new media. Currently head of the artist-run space STWST. Lives in Linz/Austria. https://quasikunst.stwst.at