2019
> CRISS CROSS / Sebastien de Ganay / Raffaella della Olga
> Curated by Jürgen Tabor / Gil Yefman, Kibbutz Buchenwald
Gerold Tusch / appassionato-dolce-con spirito
> Gudrun Kampl / Schwarzes Gold
> Literal / Robert Barry, Julius Deutschbauer, Monika Piorkowska, Jana Sterbak, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner
2018
> Matthias Herrmann Textpieces 96-98
Konkret Frau / Curated by Gerald Matt
> Masken
Tomasz Kulka / Das Ding
> Natalia LL
2017
> Renate Bertlmann
#It´s You too / Renate Bertlmann
> Anouk Lamm Anouk / I miss the place where I am from
> EASE / Robert Barry / Günther Förg / Tony Oursler / Keith Sonnier
> Artissima / VIVACE with Renate Bertlmann, Natalia LL and Jana Sterbak
> Curated by Eva Fabbris / LIVE END DREAM NO
> everybody anybody / group show
> liquid democracy / Monika Piorkowska, Curated by Angela Stief
> KeramiK Curated by Dietgard Grimmer with Jessica Lajard Barbara Reisinger Jeanne Susplugas Elmar Trenkwalder Gerold Tusch
2016
> Sébastien de Ganay / Non Places
> Clemens Wolf / Grounded
> Curated by / Michel Blancsubé / I´ve decided to be happy because it´s good for one´s health / Jana Sterbak
> Olga Georgieva / Looking for score
> Gudrun Kampl / Ornament oder Verbrechen
> Dieter Roth / aus einer Sammlung Exil, Selbstbildnis, Speedy-Drawing, Taschenzimmer
> VIVACE / Renate Bertlmann, Gloria Friedmann, Natalia LL, Jana Sterbak
2015
> Curated by / Myriam Ben Salah, Like The Deserts Miss The Real, Sarah Abu Abdallah, Abdullah Al Mutairi, Marwa Arsanios , Gcc, Raja’a Khalid
> Larbi Cherkaoui
> Julius Deutschbauer Klaus Pobitzer / Habs-Burgerstand, Ein Prä-Resümee
> Ilse Haider / le circuit heroesque
> Matthias Herrmann / On Photography
> Verortungen / Alyce Aycock, Peter Hopkins, Tania Kitchell, Ken Lum, Paul Morrison , Georges Rousse, Michaela Spiegel, Clemens Wolf
> Gudrun Kampl / Value Love Word Cell
> Curated by / Peter Stastny / Good NIght, Mister Procrustes / Francis Alÿs, Zipora Fried, Jim Shaw, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Kiki Smith, Jana Sterbak, Jeanne Susplugas
CURATED BY _VIENNA_2015
Tomorrow Today | Concept Armen Avanessian
LIKE THE DESERTS MISS THE REAL
Curated by MYRIAM BEN SALAH
SARAH ABU ABDALLAH
ABDULLAH AL MUTAIRI
MARWA ARSANIOS
GCC
RAJA’A KHALID
10.9. - 27.10.2015
GCC, The One and Only Madinat New Museum Royal Mirage, 2014, Foto (c) GCC
Raja’a Khalid, Oud Aura, 2015. Duftzerstäuber, synthetisch hergestelltes Oud-Öl, Fotos: the artist, funded by the Maraya Art Centre
Sarah Abu Abdallah, Still from Saudi Automobile, 2012, video performance. Courtesy of the artist.
Abdullah Al Mutairi, Video Medley
LIKE THE DESERTS MISS THE REAL
CURATED BY MYRIAM BEN SALAH
In her essay Gaze of Sci-Fi Wahabi (2007–2008), Qatari- American artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria describes the contemporary Arabian Gulf as “a region acting as an uncanny preview of long-imagined futures/nows, where love is mediated by mobile and death conquered by camera.” Over the last fifty years, the post-oil Arabian Gulf transformed so quickly it seems to have jumped through time. With no differentiation between old and new (everything is recent), it is the the realm of the “jawal” (mobile phone), of ever expanding malls, of fast cars and fast techs, of architectural master plans and environmental collapses; all of the above being parlous interfaces to globalized consumerism and a one-way ticket to a giddy global future no one was ready for. This quirky reign of late capitalism is based on nothing but a resource doomed to disappear, making the whole situation look like a mirage or a hologram, in the sense that Baudrillard could claim that “the Gulf doesn’t exist”.
This context inevitably puts into perspective any idea of “accelerationism”: how would it be possible to accelerate the conditions of consumer capital in a region where they are already among the most accelerated in the world? What place is left to an emancipatory artistic imagination and to poetic practices when science-fiction becomes, indeed, the best kind of realism? (J.G. Ballard).
Like the deserts miss the real departs from what Al Maria coins in her essay as “Gulf Futurism” to tackle a wider acceptation of the future as a formal and conceptual device that contributes to creating a shift in the artistic practices of a generation dealing with a failed utopian dream of pan-Arabism. Inspired from the band Everything but the Girl’s lyrics, the title of the exhibitions is a reference to “Welcome to the desert of the real” a title for Slavoj Žižek’s 2002 essay and a quote from the 1999 movie The Matrix, both alluding to a phrase in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Diluted into some sort of time void, the future becomes a tool for artists to dive into a new way of relating images and objects and to draw the outlines of a dystopian tomorrowturned- today. From a deft manipulation of late capitalistic items like advertising or brand management to the use of architecture as a deliberate speculative exercise since it tests reality and triggers possibilities for the future, the works in the show shape a new space-time continuum where “archeology and science-fiction coincide in a notion of materiality” (Reza Negarestani)
Myriam Ben Salah