The exhibited photographs present a selection from the series of images created for a publication about the project that was never realized and the structure that was never built. Within the two-dimensional parameters of the publication, the resulting photographs have given the structure a new ‘life’ and a form we have not anticipated before. Nevertheless, through the act of exhibiting them back in the three-dimensional space, the photographs bring the structure much closer to its initial, imagined existence. It was to be realized in the form of a staircase built out of three Möbius strips, cut and inserted into the space so as to create the experience of a constant movement. The structure was also meant to accommodate various artworks, created in different mediums, forms and shapes, and placed where they are seen or heard best. It was meant to offer a chance for a walk, for a stroll through the walls of a museum building, meant to open new passages for its various levels and unexplored possibilities. By walking on the structure, the visitors would have had the opportunity to see and experience the room and the artworks from many different positions and perspectives. In the publication, the series of photographs show this movement of the structure and offer multiplicity of forms and identities it might have had in reality. The decision not to exhibit series of photographs but large-scale images of selected few is based on the idea to offer snapshots of the ‘moving’ structure, at the same time liberating them from their burdening origin. The wooden structure on which they are mounted is not only a reference to Frederick Kiesler, whose work has been a great inspiration to us; it also creates a new possibility to exhibit large-scale photographs without turning them into wallpapers, but instead destroying their totalizing effect, breaking their phantasmagoric potential and framing them with the surrounding reality.
The opening, Vienna 2009
Tamuna Chabashvili, Adi Hollander, Vesna Madzoski, Monika Pessler, Gerd Zillner, Vienna 2009
