GRAZ.- Although archives safeguard and preserve documents, they are not always accessible to the public, or else access to these documents is considerably restricted. So archives regulate the relationship between the visible, the accessible, and the concealed. For this reason, it is often exceedingly difficult to reconstruct the histories/stories of institutions. Since the year 2017, Camera Austria has been exploring its own archive in a different way: all archival material is being presented in two exhibitions. The Vienna-based artists Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch have developed a publication concept for this archive, so that it will remain available as reference collection in Camera Austria’s library after the exhibitions are over. Boris Groys writes that an archive is suspended as soon as it becomes the subject of an exhibition. Yet instead of transforming the archive into an exhibition, Six & Petritsch turn the exhibition space itself into a site for viewing and probing the archive. The project aims—with this gesture of public disclosure—to give something back to the public, to restitute the archive in a certain sense, to transform it into a common space. Through this gesture, the work that formed this archive ultimately has its own say.

Ambivalence as a stance and impetus in seeking form and anti-form play a decisive role for Ute Müller: be it casts of negative forms of almost recognizable objects or arrangements of found, easy-to-change, and thus differently charged things. The artist makes comprehensible the process of formation; she varies materials and combines references without allowing anything specific to be missed when grappling with form, idea, and presentation. The categories of space and time are vital for the artist. For Room C at the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, which is structured by its pillars, the artist has designed an environment in which the paintings and the sculptures interrelate, but also the curved walls placed throughout the room engage with the shown exhibits. The mediums of painting and sculpture thus meet and make connections.

At nighttime, the illustrator Ingo Abeska sorts through his loot: international newspapers and magazines serve as an inspiration and a medium. He skims the individual pages; some things seem relevant and catch his interest, while others he ignores. Ultimately, he intuitively selects a motif, a report, or a miniature that elicits a rather brief, involuntary response. Like in an atlas, Abeska collects drawings to create a personal cartograph that not only facilitates his approach to interpreting the world of news and current developments, but also opens up a view of the beyond.

For < rotor >, the year of review and reflection is drawing to a close. Finally, this is now a second exhibition of selected works by artists whose work has had a lasting impact on the programming of the art center. On the one hand, this applies to the understanding of contemporary art in general, and on the other, to pathbreaking approaches to issues such as (alternative) forms of society, (urban) transformation and migration movements, mechanisms of (political) power, and European (East–West) dialogues.

With Esra Ersen, G.R.A.M., Nevan Lahart, Kristina Leko, Katrin Plavčak, Christoph Schäfer

The Grazer Kunstverein is presenting two new exhibitions by Isabel Nolan (Curling Up With Reality) and Ola Vasiljeva (The Decline of the Showpieces) as part of the Winter Season 2017. Isabel Nolan works with sculpture, textiles, photographs, and text to describe or reveal moments (material, temporal, or otherwise) emerging from the fundamental human desire to find the world meaningful. Ola Vasiljeva borrows fragments from history and literature to create imaginary thresholds in which sculpture, drawing, videos, and found objects commingle on a level playing field. The artistic program of the Grazer Kunstverein is drawn together under the guiding leitmotif "The Necessity of Art" inspired by the late author, politician, and dedicated anti-fascist Ernst Fischer. New commissions by Isabel Nolan and Ola Vasiljeva are presented amidst the traces, developments and reconfigurations of the wider artistic programme, with an accumulation of works on display by Emily Mast (The Seed Eaters), Ruth E Lyons (Women’s Wear for Worldly Work), Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Le Fleuve dans le Ventre / Der Fluß im Bauch), Edward Clydesdale Thomson (The Coming Garden), Céline Condorelli (Things That Go Without Saying), Chris Evans and Morten Norbye Halvorsen (Jingle), Fiona Hallinan (Fink’s), Isabella Kohlhuber (Space for an Agreement), and Adam Zagajewski (We Know What Art Is).