7. Juni 2021
Dokapi, Kollegiumgasse 2, 4020 Linz und Aotu Space, Beijing
Ausstellung zum Thema Gastfreundschaft und Gedankenaustausch in einer Zeit eingeschränkter Mobilität.
Kooperationsprojekt der Kunstuniversität Linz, Abteilung Experimentelle Gestaltung und I: project space
Distant digital Zoom curation by
远距离数字策展团队
I: project space
Marlene Hausegger
Muxia Liu 刘沐夏
The group exhibition “Eating distance” is a constellation of works that attempt to restart hospitality and sharing thoughts in a time of reduced mobility worldwide. Through hosting the visitors at a dinner table while sharing a meal between Linz and Beijing, they start to untangle complex histories and question current issues, from globalisation, cross-cultural communication to predicting the future through fortune telling. This first serving of art, food and politics introduces some of the issues and ideas that are pressing for our current time. Mobility has been an important factor in the art world since the 1950s. Creating art has become synonymous with movement, travel and encounters. However, the mobile art world has been facing new challenges since last year: What does it mean to displace our experimental group, from one continent to another? How does such an initiative engage with a new local context without a real physical presence? How do we take account socio-cultural dynamics? Now a radical questioning of the conventional artistic production and presentation system is necessary: research, creation and presentation as well as, above all, international exchange.
As part of the course “Thinking over borders” the students of the Kunst Universität Linz discussed and tested new ways of art production and exhibition practice on the basis of an exhibition at Aotu Space in Beijing.
Beiträge der Studierenden
Walentina Ammann || unsaid.
Mixed media, e-piano, cotton, 2021
The inability to express emotion.
Thoughts that cannot be put into words.
Choking up on the verge of crying.
Missed opportunities.
Stifling social situations.
Suffocating family patterns.
The deliberate destruction of the black keys limits the expression the instrument and its player.
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Felix Brinkmann || Inscriptions
Mixed media, silicon hands, delivery bag, stickers, pen, 2021
We form these hands; we shape these lives. A hand holding a food delivery reaches through the wall into the gallery space. The visitors are engaged to write down reasons for ordering online and to afterwards adhere them to the hand. The bare working-hand objectifies anonymized and unpersonalised labour. It is frozen in the gesture of serving. In todays digitalized world the production and shipping of goods obscures more and more in the background behind one-way-designed, “customer-oriented” ordering-platforms. The delivery of an ordered good to the customer as the last visible link in the chain of production is used as a gate through which can be reached back into this chain. The small interaction with the hand of an abstract servant can build up empathy for the people involved in production, those seemingly faceless other(s) behind the wall, and it can also contribute to an awareness for the weight of one’s own habits and justifications in the very shaping of their hands and their movements. Ultimately the question thrown up is: What do we want to do with the hand(s) that feed us? The whole sculpture has itself been ordered on Taobao.
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Amanda Burzić || Portraits of people that have prepared food for me
Postcards, 2021
Burzić visited friends and family and they cook food for her. After they finished eating, she took a photo of them in their kitchen.
Sabine Dichatschek & Tabitha Haynes
Blob
Installation, tablecloth, HD video, 03:33 min, 2021
A film by Sabine Dichatschek with music by Tabitha Haynes which is projected on a white tablecloth on the side of a table.
On the theme of science fiction, the video features futuristic food with a surreal twist. It is sensual, beautiful and delicious.
In the video, tension builds in an uncanny atmosphere. The food served, undefined shapes on a plate, begin to throb and come alive. Questions arise about artificiality and reality. The distributed roles become blurred. Who is the food and who is eating?
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Sabine Dichatschek & Tabitha Haynes || Blob
Installation, tablecloth, HD video, 03:33 min, 2021
A film by Sabine Dichatschek with music by Tabitha Haynes which is projected on a white tablecloth on the side of a table.
On the theme of science fiction, the video features futuristic food with a surreal twist. It is sensual, beautiful and delicious.
In the video, tension builds in an uncanny atmosphere. The food served, undefined shapes on a plate, begin to throb and come alive. Questions arise about artificiality and reality. The distributed roles become blurred. Who is the food and who is eating?
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Dasol Kim || Difference of System, 2021
Textile, 40x35cm, 60x50cm Video, 0:32 sec
Looking at the different eating cultures reveals a lot about Austria and China. While Austria divides food into categories of pre-meal, main and dessert, Chinese food is not served with that distinction. Also, sharing food is less common in Austria and more the norm in China. What both countries share is that eating is the most basic factor in a person’s life.
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Anja Korherr || Untitled (Tablecloth)
Tablecloth, 2021
Every tablecloth carries the story of a past event. It can tell you about people eating together, coming together and connecting over the food they share. In this case, the story was made visible right before it was written. So, take a seat, enjoy, and let us come together on this dinner table.
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Catrin Manoli aka Cooky || Broken
Video, 01:12 min, 2021
Installation, chicken bones, 2021
Bones are thrown into a fire. The over heating is creating cracks in the bones. They are encoded signs to read the future. Just as the bones always consisted out of a certain carbon compound, the pattern of cracks in the bones were repeated. Like the pattern on a capped smartphone. But if people live in the same era, they are more likely to experience something similar. A cross in the middle divides the time into two, or more. Looking up to the unconscious. The further away and closer to you, the bones are, they becoming aware who are. They fall in the past, the present and the future. If they all fall in the middle, it is manifesting the purest me, the purest you. The attraction of perception is arbitrary visible. But why is the earth draw forced pull the bones down forced to make the disbelief invisible. It is just a game, you always have to be aware of that. Otherwise, a chicken had to die for nothing, for your desire and for your knowledge. Bones like them are always cleaned with honor.
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NiR & Pan Kaijian 潘开建 || Comiendo palabras – Eating words – 吃词 – Wenn du isst
Napkins, 2021
This napkin artist book deals with the topics of food, communication, and mistranslations in a transnational exchange between the two artists. The expression ‘eating words’ refers to when we talk and accidentally miss words, affecting the final sense of the message. But thanks to new technologies or a good disposition, communication happens.
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Miriam Pranter & Miriam Roithinger || Conflicting feelings Fortune cookies, 2021
Two women named Miriam were pregnant. Miriam had her baby and Miriam lost hers. Both tell of experiences that any Miriam in this world could have and that affect every human being.
It is a careful attempt to bring the conflicting feelings and taboo subjects of this event, which has such a positive connotation, to the big table, sheltered in a biscuit. It is a first step towards bringing these human experiences into consciousness and integrating them into society as a whole.
Emotional, personal, secret feelings can thus be transformed into a spiritual general knowledge for men and women.
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Emily Ramharter || the smell of winter" / "运 ⽓⽓
Photography, 100 x 66 cm on alu dibond, 2021
"the smell of winter" / "运 ⽓⽓" is an artwork that deliberately deals with the different cultural associations of one and the same motif. An attempt to connect/bring both cultures closer to each other through an image.
In Austria we eat mandarins in the wintertime, mostly due Christmas. After eating we put the leftover peel on the heater, to make the room smell amazing.
In the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) mandarins are considered as „cold fruits“.
The sour taste causes the body juices to stay inside and helps against too much sweating, therefore keeps the pathogenic moisture in the body, which is very unfavorable especially in case of mucous lungs with cough or cold. From this point of view, it makes little sense to eat citrus fruits in the cold wintertime.
Mandarins also stand for luck & fortune in China. Like a fruit, you can cut up the Chinese word for “fortune” and it turns into “gas”, which closes the circle to heating.
Apart from the fruit, in German we also say "Mandarin" for the Chinese language.
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Georg Schuchlenz || Assembled in China
Mixed media, chopsticks, 2021
The artwork deals on the one hand with the supply chain and the exchange of goods between Austria and China and on the other hand with product labeling. A fabric produced in Austria and transported by freight train to China serves as working material for a product finished in China. Furthermore, a video draws attention to disposable chopsticks, every year 45 billion disposable chopsticks made of bamboo or wood are consumed, per year 25 million trees are cut down in China and two million cubic meters of wood from the forests are processed which are then sold worldwide.
