Press Release
Linz, 27 February 2004

 

OPEN HOUSE
Art and the Public Sphere
12 March – 30 April 2004


Curators: Thomas Edlinger, Stella Rollig, Roland Schöny
Opening: 11 March 2004, 8:00 p.m.



Olaf Arndt & Rob Moonen - Big Hope - Michael Blum - Candice Breitz - Harun Farocki - Andrea Geyer - Gregor Graf – LIGNA - Mark Lombardi - Marko Lulic - Oliver Ressler - Andrea van der Straeten - Silke Wagner

OPEN HOUSE focuses on the status of art and the public sphere today. Special attention is devoted to the rapid transformations of urban space, which have had a lasting influence on critical art practice in recent years.

Starting from the city of Linz and its situation of wide-scale rebuilding as a model case, art projects are presented that reflect on urban space as a stage for global economicization and as a laboratory for alternative business models, and as a location in the charged field in between an official understanding of history and subversive appropriation.

Urban spaces that were formerly defined as public and used that way, have gradually been transformed into a Cinecittà of modernist and postmodern architecture, the motor of which is driven by the interests of big business and spectacle. Parallel to continuously optimized navigation systems of illuminated advertisements and signposts, consumer statistics and diagrams of movement become increasingly significant, ultimately converging in new forms of surveillance technology and the conception of increasingly complex security measures.

Artists and collectives were invited to take part in the exhibition, who pose the concept of the urban public sphere, the production of visual images in public space, or the possibilities of artistic interventions for discussion with their own forms of expression, thus dealing with relevant themes going beyond the field of art.
The O.K becomes a magnetic field of confrontations and forms of communication at the nexus of visual art and social practice, leading into the field of action of the city.

With the event OPEN WEEKEND (26/27 March), the exhibition gains an additional dynamic: an open space initiating discussions, lectures and performative projects. The central theme is the question of the possibilities of alternative modes of living and working in a late capitalist society.
with: b_books, Eva Illouz, Glückliche Arbeitslose, Malmoe, Terre Thaemlitz


Press discussion: 11 March 2004, 10.30 a.m.

Press information: Maria Falkinger, t:+43.732.784178-203, m.falkinger@ok-centrum.at