Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna “Pro(s)thesis” + “Posthuman Complicities”

Vienna, March 10 – May 14, 2017, http://www.akbild.ac.at

Two shows opened simultaneously and appeared to be intertwined in some way. One declared to be about feminism and the body, the other about the post-human condition and the sea metaphor.

Before writing on, please allow for a short critical interlude:

Does it need any comment? Is this post-modern, post-internet, post-media or post-human? No matter what, default screensavers and no-signal messages remain an almost obligatory element of any exhibition using one or more moving image works.

The visitors entered the space through the Pro(s)thesis exhibition. As the title promised, there was a number of artworks addressing the body-machine relationship and prosthetics. The curators Berenice Pahl and Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein did a thorough research through artwork image databases of the recent decades and put together a number of artworks that all carried elements visually or conceptually referring to the theme with a feminist undertone added. The number of print and video-based artworks made me think of the research-based exhibitions displayed at Para Site in Hong Kong, yet in the large space of the Academy’s exhibition halls, the artworks appeared dwarfed by the space and isolated. There was an attempt to counteract this impression by two metal sculptures, that however appeared rather cold and distant. So overall, I left with a feeling of missing something, some element that would help to connect all the related impressions into one flowing narrative.

Other two exhibition halls featured the Posthuman Complexities show. From a quick view around the room, the topic could be rather easily identified as delineated by the recent post-internet, post-media etc. art style. The exhibits reminded me for example of the recent transmediale show. After walking around, I assigned a central importance to Otolith Group’s prominently featured film Hydra Decapita. I was lucky to see the whole film previously in a comfortable theatre setting, otherwise I would have probably missed this point and only wandered around annoyed by its ever present soundtrack. The combination of the sea metaphor with sci-fi elements and African-American slave trade history in the film was clearly linked with other artworks in the show, e.g. the visual representation of M.Nourbese Philip’s Zong! poem (thematizing slave trade) or Joey Holder’s Proteus (combing the flow of water, deep sea exploration and the never-ending flow of information of screen). Thus, the coherence and flow of the show could be traced back to the curator’s (Andrea Popelka and Lisa Stuckey) decision to take Hydra Decapita as their starting point: a film created in a time when post-internet art was barely starting off, and based on a mythology developed by music project Drexcyia almost two decades prior to that.