The Flip Side (Die Kehrseite)

Summer Exhibition 2020 of the state of Upper Austria
aquisition for the state collection in 2020

How close to current events do you place your artistic content? Should one react at all?

Parallel plot: The sky becomes empty. The unthinkable is not only imagined, it becomes possible. The reaction to a virus changes our entire life structure within a few weeks. No planes in the sky, no commute to work.

Shortly after the first lockdown in spring 2020, Franz Kafka's reversal: an open call is sent out from the castle. OÖ KulturGmbH (sic!) is calling for a summer exhibition at Linz Castle, making reference to the Royal Academy in London and its summer exhibitions. The format is a lightning-fast reaction to the events.

Illuminating the other side of The Flip Side

The thorn in the side: The call in April requires work that was created this year (2020), i.e. in the last few months, but deliberately makes no reference to the pandemic. However, it seems clear that this reference is desired and demanded via the temporal dimension. Reports about the virus only reached a broader public in January, and by the end of February it had reached Austria in full.

One always reacts

Artistic work is very laborious. Your own feelings flow into your images. There is often a long way from the camera to the wall on which the picture is displayed. You recognise what is important to you in the world and automatically deal with it. There is no such thing as not reacting. Even if I don't take pictures that are explicitly about corona.

The decision is made to formulate ›The flip side‹. The submitted images show postal packages, but only from their flip side. Of course, this work has a strong symbolic/philosophical component. Placed in a pandemic context, the question is what is actually the flip side of the pandemic? The pandemic is being reviewed negatively, so the flip side must be positive. The viewer can ask exactly that.

However, the topic of data protection is also addressed. Viewers are not told where the parcels come from or who the recipients are. In the course of the pandemic, data protection is coming under further pressure. For example, the movement data of Austrian cell phone users is being transferred to the government without any discourse worth mentioning, to name just one example. In this work, sender and recipient data are deliberately concealed.

When is a work actually created?

Another aspect is discussed on the basis of this participation in the exhibition: When is a work created? Is it the one hundredth of a second of the shot? Is it the moment when I am standing in the shower and have the idea of the context? Or is it a stretched period of time?

Now I reveal that they are parcels that were all addressed to me, mail ordered goods. This has has taken on a new significance during the pandemic. A fact that will keep us structurally busy for a long time to come.

The exhibited works from ›The Flip Side‹ were purchased by the province of Upper Austria for their collection.
dramaturgy of social life

However, not a single Image presented was taken in 2020. They were all taken before, some long before. They were simply resting in my collection. Did I violate the terms of the competition here?

I decided to date the recording to the moment when I was in the shower, the brief period in which I realised how I wanted to respond to the call for proposals and its implicit thematisation of the pandemic. That moment when I realised that I wanted to package structural change, data protection, the empty sky, the question of when an artwork was created in precisely this form. Of course, many of these packages are only gradually opening up.

Exhibition View

Details

size of the prints shown on this page are 60 x 84 cm
pigment-print druck on vat paper
Limited Edition with 5 + II Artist Prints (e.a.), signed and numbered
Price on request
cf. buying art for further information