The Kunstverein Medienturm Presents "The Hauntings" in Art, Media & Pop

Written by Axeli Foley Friday, 30 September 2011 22:50

Graz, Austria.- The Kunstverein Medienturm is pleased to present "Hauntings - Ghost Box Media" on view at the museum until December 17th. For as long as the mediums have been in existence, people have believed that these media maintain a special connection to the beyond. Writing, photography, the sound recording, the film image – each one is the placeholder for an absent presence, for a past - or future - elsewhere whose after-effects linger in the here and now. Under the current conditions of open and electronicall y available archives, these symptoms are growing more radical : there is virtually no media artefact in existence today that is not haunted by – or, even, that does not explicitly invoke – a “spectre” or “ghost” from the past.

"Hauntings" explores these themes through contemporary art. What are the characteristic features of this furtive or uncanny presence in contemporary art? How does the “presence of a spectre” (Jacques Derrida) manifest itself through solid, physical art? Which “undead”, be it spectral repercussions or other matters that simply refuse to die, haunt an art whose aspiration to show the present is one of its defining traits? Which political and social codes are inscribed within these approaches that flirt with the appeal of a concealed presence or of the notably absent? Through a cross-section of different media, the exhibiti "Hauntings – Ghost Box Media" is dedicated to various reverberating effects. Awaiting visitors in the entry area of the Kunstverein Medienturm is a reduced combination of image and sound, an “audio-vision” whose fundamental parts are compartmentalised: while a photograph by Yto Barrada shows the faint imprints left on a white wall by a football without being able to trace their creator, a CD by Carl Michael von Hausswolff evokes the presence of unwelcome guests. It is the sound of scurrying rats, which may well be nesting in the old masonry and which concurrently symbolise immanent disruption within all communication: “They are, as the saying goes, always already there. Part of the building.” In the first main exhibition room Leif Elggren’s film of an old sewing machine manipulated by a ghostly hand, again and again clattering away, correlates with Claudia Larcher’s slow camera pan through a deserted one-family home evincing all sorts of familiar elements (and, precisely for this reason, elements that have become uncanny). Adjacent is a work that seems to have abandoned all pictorial references and instead primarily marks a vacancy: Walid Raad’s "A History of a Donator" shows the empty frame of a picture that a fictitious donor presented to an equally fictitious museum. Finally, Leif Elggren’s "Table of the Dead", which appears to be wired to an underwater netherworld, references a media setting that has lost its familiarity in the present-day: bourgeois furnishings that are engaged in service of the otherworldly, the deceased, yes, even of séances and communicati on with the dead.


In the second main exhibition room, this menagerie is complemented by further sculptures. Yet at the same the time, the gaze is clearly trained to the outside. This is, for instance, apparent in two of Yto Barrada’s photographs. "Container 1" evokes a range of abstract associations, such as a cartograph, a view out from within a cave, or a crack spreading across a surface. Hung beside it is the photograph of a concrete North African street scene, which nevertheless lacks tangibility: five women standing opposite a man who is holding in his arms a model of a sailing vessel. All protagonists, save one woman, are gazing at something absent within the picture. In two further spatial installations this reference to the past also manifests in a regression to outdated media technology. Markus Schinwald, in his installation, harks back to the allure and the achievements of traditional illusionism – staged in a purposefully “low-tech” and anachronistic way. Photographs of Ghanian voodoo drummers recording a curse against George Bush, commissioned by Minerva Cuevas, not only re-appropriate the gramophone to represent more than just comments on the conspiratorial mode of U.S. politics against the “axis of evil”, it also reminds us of its former function as an ethnological instrument for recording the mumbling of the “wild ones”. Zineb Sedira’s three-part photo series in turn shows a building with a deserted, skeleton-like air in Algiers, where – as the legend goes – torture is said to have been carried out. And the twenty-part photo tableau by Alejandro Vidal plays with the allure of the uncanny and the disastrous. Are these pictures of terrorist attacks, bombings, or rather just banal fireworks? In an over-painted graphic print by Hans Weigand a tidal wave towers up above a surfing board against a dilapidated background, which could well have once heralded a Californian dream along the Pacific coast. But the path continues on to a space that is solely dedicated to the phenomenon of so-called “paranormal tape-recorded voices”. Various works – those by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Michael Esposito, by Mike Kelley and Scanner, as well as by one of the pioneers of the hermeneutics of mediatic noise, the Latvian scientist Konstantin Raudive – facilitate the experience of various technical stages of “electronic voice phenomena”. Viewable in the neighbouring room is the film "Hydra decapita" by The Otolith Group which was inspired by the story of the “black Atl antic” and has been programmed with fixed starting times. Explored here, and further fictionalised, is the myth of the sea-born techno-outfit Drexciya, who haunt us from a distant future as descendants of African slaves who had been tossed overboard. As a bodiless “ghost”, Drexciya begins to speak through the voice of the female narrator, while the textures of water surfaces, of the oceanic and unfathomable depths, are visually conjured.


A series of collages by Jakob Kolding, which condense diverse visitations from retro-futurist contexts, leads to two video stations in which the disadvantages of erstwhile promises spawned by technology and progress are carefully examined: to start with, the short film "Suicide Box" by the Bureau of Inverse Technology, in which the attraction of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge as a magnet for countless suicides is analysed and a specifically developed surveillance mechanism implemented to support this analysis; also, a series of newly staged British public-information films by the musician Baron Mordant that emphasise the dark flipsides of what was once a future-oriented euphoria. This selection is supplemented by a compilation of music-related videos that are to be classified under the genre of “hauntology” – a variety of electronic vintage sounds whose flagship is the scene associated with the British label Ghost Box. The final room, encompasses an entire stage for the short film "Phantoms of Nabua" by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The nocturnal setting of the film involves a film projection outside, a florescent light tower, as well as youths who are playing with a burning football. While this pursuit does not leave faded imprints on a wall as in Barrada’s photograph, it does leave behind gleaming tracks of light on the dark lawn. In the end the screen is consumed by fire, and we gaze head-on into the white light of the projector. White light, white heat.

The Graz-based art association Kunstverein Medienturm continuously presents exhibitions, screenings and theoretical discussions, which are also edited in publications. In the field where media art and fine art experience cross over moments, material- and context references of "new media" face "old media" in a productive way. This interdisciplinary approach is basis for a preferred development of cross-medial projects, which advance current questions in the field of art production and theoretical reflection. Visit the association's website at ... http://medienturm.at

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