Mathias Poledna, Dominik Lang, and Miriam Bajtala
in meinem Namen
February 27–April 21, 2013
Opening: Tuesday, February 26, 7pm
Friedrichstrasse 12, 1010 Vienna
Mathias Poledna’s work examines interconnections between art and entertainment, modernism in architecture and design, the language of film, and the history of exhibition making. The specific historical quality of these phenomena in particular constitutes a central point of departure. Most recently his art has often taken the form of highly condensed film installations through which a complex tension unfolds between what is presented and the concepts and cultural ideas circulating around it. The characteristic quality of Poledna’s approach is the concise employment of cultural connections and historical contexts in combination with repetition, displacement, condensation, and elision. In his filmic works the visceral effects of the projected image, the tension between image and sound, and the complex interweaving of popular music and filmic language are recurrent motifs. Time and again his precisely orchestrated interventions in the exhibition space, which are informed by his interest in the art of the 1960s and 1970s institutional critique, also shift constitutive and ephemeral elements of exhibition making—architecture, design, publications—from the periphery to the center of his practice.
Mathias Poledna, born in Vienna in 1965, lives and works in Los Angeles. He will represent Austria at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
In subtle interventions and installations, Dominik Lang examines the complex relations between viewer and object, object and space, subjective perception and the museum. Often, he draws attention to something that already exists and renders visible things that have been overlooked. His interventions in the gallery space and his assemblages of objects, artifacts and structural elements are marked by a conceptual, sometimes rather absurd and surrealist approach.
At the Secession, Lang deals with the blind spots of modernism and develops a new perspective on its works and their context. His installation Expanded Anxiety is based on the expressionist-cubist statue Ùzkost (Fear), 1911/12, by Czech sculptor Otto Gutfreund (1889–1927). Lang has reproduced the cast plaster work on a scale that fills the space, lying on its side. This transformation creates a fascinating interplay between inside and outside, surface and volume, chance and design, sculpture and architecture. Lang came to international prominence thanks, among others, to a work titled Sleeping City that he showed at the pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republics at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.
Dominik Lang, born in 1980 in Prague, lives and works in Prague.
in meinem Namen
In videos, drawings and sculptures, as well as text-based works and performative installations, Miriam Bajtala deals with perception and the parameters that define and modify it such as space, time, and context. Speech, written text, vocal variations, and the loss and acquisition of language are both the subject and the means for her artistic analysis and appropriation. In a new work devised especially for the exhibition at the Secession, titled in meinem Namen (in my Name), 2013, Bajtala addresses and questions her role as an artist by juxtaposing the way she sees herself with the views of four other cultural producers. The inaugural address for the show serves Bajtala as a starting point from which to approach the issue of speaking about artistic production—mainly delegated to others—self-reflexively reclaiming the way the work is communicated.
Miriam Bajtala, born in 1970 in Bratislava, lives and works in Vienna.
Press conference: Tuesday, February 26, 10am
Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists
T +43 1 587 53 07 11
F +43 1 587 53 07 34
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10–6pm
Guided tours: Saturdays at 3pm and Sundays at 11am and by appointment
Permanent presentation: Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze with Plattform by Gerwald Rockenschaub until April 7, 2013.