HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents Heinrich Dunst: sink, and on affairs

sink
Heinrich Dunst is an Austrian conceptual artist at the moment. His works have always raised intriguing fundamental concerns about art, such as how works are generated and what a current production looks like. What is the relationship between visual art and language? The artist experiments with language in the form of solitary words or parts of sentences, items abstracted from their ordinary environment, and other visual media. Several lines of connection occur between these separate levels during the process, which can be used to think differently about the meaning and possibilities of art. The exhibition seeks to make apparent techniques of displacement, gap creation, and shifting speed within creative idioms in order to weave a rich network of forms that strives to demonstrate how art is generated between ideas, language, and objects. Even though the artist has established a strictly rigid series of works, the associative spaces that are opened up in this manner present the viewer with a plethora of different interpretations. Heinrich Dunst addresses the “migration of forms,” including grasping at items whose status might be so difficult to accurately characterize in our media-based transitory age, and yet this concerns their so difficult-to-achieve modern designation as works of art.

On affairs

with Noah Barker, Milena Büsch, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Lorenza Longhi, Vera Lutz, Studio For Propositional Film, and Sung Tieu

The group exhibition on affairs showcases a new generation of international artists who approach conceptual art in a variety of methods. Text, diverse appropriation methods, media in all their forms, and a play with the institution itself all play crucial roles. While works in classical conceptual art are limited to an idea, the object and how it is produced is becoming increasingly relevant to today’s youth. The various varieties of modern conceptual art that this exhibition brings together demonstrate a wide range of approaches to addressing how art may help us better comprehend and encounter our own period, as well as find strategies to negotiate it. Post-conceptual follows conceptual without its art’s current relevance becoming exhausted in the future. The many methods of isolating and selecting images lead to greater clarity not only about their own unique traits, but also about their relationship to the object in its fragile diversity, whether in language, poetry, or form.

Sandro Droschl and Jan Tappe curated the exhibition.

The exhibitions are complemented by a diverse program of events that try to expand on and communicate the content across all of the institution’s outlets. In the spring, saxpublishers (Vienna) will release a joint publication for the two shows, which will include two essays by Kolja Reichert and Marina Vishmidt, as well as comprehensive text and visual content.