Kunstraum Lakeside presents exhibition program 2023: Hollow Ground

The theme of the 2023 annual program at Kunstraum Lakeside—a crossroads of art, commerce, and technology since its inception—is the slippery subterranean, the increasingly weak connecting threads of society.

Kunstraum Lakeside’s program is centered on current patterns of existence, a play on one of its most recognizable architectural characteristics. Work by the invited artists shows the essential conditions of living today in the same way that the visible floor surface of the art space, once exposed, reveals the underlying technical infrastructure. Hollow Ground investigates performances that reshape reality in both analog and digital space, as well as the technological and/or social scripts that foreshadow individual lifeworlds in the twenty-first century. If nothing else, it is about the human body’s frailty, its susceptibility.

Linking exhibitions at places like Kunstraum Lakeside with funfair spectacles sheds new light on the ambivalences that surround art creators as well as people who consume and exhibit it. All of the characters are intertwined, making it difficult to view Kunstraum Lakeside, or any other artistic production space, as a site where techno-social processes are reflected upon from the outside, and therefore from a distant and disembodied standpoint. Rather, it is a stage, an auditorium, where actors and audience are equally participating in a setting similar to that of a theatre rehearsal.

The special thing about attending a rehearsal, “whether as director, actor, technician, or prompter”, is that one is essentially “a spectator and an actor at the same time. This reciprocal observation position establishes a relay between production and reflection that allows one to switch between external and self-observation. In this sense, the rehearsal can be conceived as a series of performances that continually provokes new constellations of observation.” (Annemarie Matzke) The uncertainties and ambiguous situations, the provisionality and potential for failure as well as experimental action, all these concomitants that distinguish the rehearsal from the real performance in front of an audience will be performed on Hollow Ground.