Ute Müller, winner of the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize 2018, makes installations that create a dynamic interplay between painting, objects, and architecture, breaking away from stale concepts of the work of art and forms of perception. Walls and plinths are removed from their usual architectural functions as frames and backdrops, themselves becoming motifs that shape both work and its perception, while images and objects recall real everyday matters in spite of their high degree of abstraction. This exhibition leads to a game with allusion. The unframed paintings have overlapping colors that seem to dissolve in the dark backgrounds, whereby they refer to the painted and drawn elements of the wall elements that dynamically reach into the exhibition space. In her works, Ute Müller reflects on the history of the artistic genres and style, and on their extensions and forms of presentation. Her work explores the act of exhibiting images and objects in space as well as sensitizing us for the role of the observer.
The exhibition Photo/Politics/Austria takes you on a photographic journey through Austrian history from 1918 to the present. This project is undertaken in cooperation with Photoinstitut Bonartes and shows around 100 works from the mumok photographs collection, and additional loans from national and international institutions. Photo/Politics/Austria is an attempt to visualize Austrian history of the last 100 years using selected photos or photo series that show special events or situations. These include a postcard series of the fire at the Palace of Justice (1927), Friedl Dicker‘s socially critical collages (1931), Ernst Haas‘s Heimkehrer(1947), and Seiichi Furuya’s State Border (1981/83), images that are just as much part of a panorama of a turbulent history as Kiki Kogelnik’s Vienna Street Pictures (1967) or a screenshot of Hans Krankl in Cordoba (1978). Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer compared the reality of the camera with reality as constructed through historical knowledge. Both media show the present as just one part of the whole. This exhibition Photo/Politics/Austria, designed by the artist Markus Schinwald, uses press photographs, interventions, newspaper cuttings, posters, and film stills as “head pictures” (Michael Diers), that complement and sharpen the “headlines” of the past.