Selected Exhibitions
Passage
Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana (2025)
curated by Vanessa Joan Müller
Dorit Margreiter Choy’s exhibition Passage presents a selection of interrelated works – films, mobiles, and photographs – that examine architecture and space in terms of their inscriptions of power, economy, and gender roles.
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A Structure
Charim Gallery, Vienna (2024)
With the exhibition A Structure at Charim Galerie in Vienna, Dorit Margreiter Choy interrelated three of her current projects that pose questions about the production of imaginary space: an installation at the Plečnik House in Ljubljana, Slovenia (2023); a film on the Bata headquarters in Zlín, Czech Republic (2023); and an artistic intervention at the Mahler Forum for Music and Society in Carinthia, Austria (2022). The exhibition opened with a painted vertical rod, followed by a collage of white stripes over a photograph of the woods.[…]
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A Structure, A Book, We And The Garden
Plečnik House, Ljubljana (2023)
curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein
[…] What does Margreiter Choy see in the spaces of those who envisioned and designed buildings that are, to this date, still used and celebrated? What does it mean to go into spaces where these people worked, like the Bata headquarters tower, or in Plečnik’s case, where he also lived? What does it mean to interact with these spaces as an active, critical, creative human being, as a female artist? After all, isn’t it a fact that the premises of celebrated visionaries, well preserved to be consumed in today’s culture, maintain the idea of these people as untouchable, ghostly figures we can pay a visit to?[…]
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Really!
Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna (2019)
mumok
curated by Matthias Michalka
The artist Dorit Margreiter has focused her attention for the past several years on the connections between visual systems and spatial structures and the consequences for our everyday life in society. Her examination of modern and contemporary architecture along with forms of media representation brings to light gender roles and power relations as she pursues links between past and present and questions the relationship between reality, representation, and fiction.[…]
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New Spaces
Charim Gallery, Vienna (2016)
Dorit Margreiter opens her show with the wide open spaces of the prairie and the shot that has become a myth. The film, in a 16mm format, shows the rider and horse in movement, in a long shot and close up against the background landscape. The clatter of the analogue projector brings an avant-garde film feeling to the Cinemascope Western genre. Margreiter has called her show ‘Neue Räume’. Taken literally, the title might apply to the newly-renovated gallery but might just as easily be taken as a daring metaphor for a new start or a scenographic code.[…]
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Description
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2011)
curated by Lynne Cooke
[…] For Dorit Margreiter, debate about the preservation of late-modernist architecture provides the occasion for probing larger issues shaping our contemporary sociocultural context: the legacy of the Modernist Movement; the ways that media representations of the built environment inform our collective imaginary; the consequences of the growing interdependence of architecture and spectacle culture.
Description, her first major survey show, comprises a rigorously selected body of interconnected works made over the past seven years whose subjects limn two broad thematics.[…]
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Locus Remix
MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles (2009)
curated by Kimberli Meyer
The final segment of the exhibition series Locus Remix. Three Contemporary Postions featured Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter. The exhibition featured a triad of film and video installation works: 10104 Angelo View Drive (2004), a silent, 16mm film transferred to video. With zentrum (2006), a 16 millimeter film, Margreiter captures a moment in the reconstruction of Leipzig, Germany as it attempts to rid itself of the traces of its Communist past. Failed Model for an Enclosed System (2006) takes the form of a slide show about the failed Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona in the early 1990s.
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Pavilion
53rd Biennale di Venezia, Austrian Pavilion (2009)
curated by VALIE EXPORT and Silvia Eiblmayr
Pavilion (2009) is a film that tells us something about the contingent relationship between the status of the image and the space inside and all around it. Dorit Margreiter took as the springboard for her film installation Josef Hoffmann’s vision of creating an ideal exhibition space for Austrian painting and sculpture in the Giardini in Venice. Built in 1934, the pavilion is both an architectural monument and an exhibition space that is used only during the summer months, vanishing from the public eye for the rest of the year. Margreiter examines in her installation how the relationship between the pavilion’s function as landmark architecture and its role as a backdrop for art is repeatedly renegotiated in the moment of its presentation.[…]
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Poverty Housing. Americus Georgia
MAK–Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (2008)
with Rebecca Baron
curated by Andreas Krištof
In the film installation Poverty Housing. Americus, Georgia film-maker Rebecca Baron and artist Dorit Margreiter address the subject of the reenactment and display of poverty as in the case of the “Global Village Discovery Center” in Americus, Georgia (USA), which contains a replica of an existing South African slum. The theme park which is operated by a non-profit association serves to raise money for the association’s social activities through the graphic visualization of poverty.
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Analog
Galerie fuer Zeitgenoessische Kunst, Leipzig (2006)
curated by Julia Schäfer
Analog is a survey of Dorit Margreiter’s artistic exploration of architecture and setting, in which she is concerned with what they represent – or have represented – and how they are used. The exhibition is divided into three equally sized spatial sequences. All the works combine an interest in images from print media, film and entertainment. The artist investigates the influence of these images on collective and individual social memory; she asks how they create or hinder identification, or indeed produce reality itself.
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10104 Angelo View Drive
Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna (2004)
mumok
curated by Matthias Michalka
At the center of the filminstallation 10104 Angelo View Drive stands a modernistic single-family homestead designed by the American architect John Lautner, which has been serving, in numerous Hollywood productions, as a place that harbours scenes of “evil”. Margreiter approaches this constructed nightmare of the Western nuclear family from several perspectives. In short filmed sequences she shows unexpected ways of utilizing or socially sharing this building, while simultaneously questioning the conventions of the cinematic representation. […]
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Everyday Life
Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2001)
curated by Silvia Eiblmayr
Margreiter investigates the influence of the film and television industry on various models of the construction of reality in conjunction with contemporary concepts of the urban or in relation to "everyday life". In this, she makes use of several historically different models: in some cases, she refers to special models of "classical" modernism – from architecture (e.g. the "Case Study House #22" built in 1947 in Los Angeles) or from Hollywood films (e.g. the famous Monument Valley known primarily from westerns), which are both intertwined with the symbolically highly charged promises of modernism (the "heroic house”, solitary, grand nature). The artist links these classical models with exemplary models from the "everyday life" of today: the world of advertising, of commodities such as cosmetics, and – another form of ultimate entertainment goods – US television series that are broadcast worldwide, so-called "soap operas" and "sitcoms".
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Short Hills
Grazer Kunstverein (1999)
curated by Eva Maria Stadler
Short Hills is a suburban town in New Jersey, where Margreiter visited her aunt and cousin - a Chinese-American family - at home and questioned them about their favorite soaps. The title not only suggests that her video should be viewed as a soap opera - albeit a rather different one, as will be seen – it also merges the real location and the possible media plot into a single entity. This false soap involves the realization of a virtual space, in which wishes are formulated and can thus be formed. Short Hills is Margreiter's attempt to update the meaning of speaking as a performance of desire and female subjectification using video, and to offer this as a real symbolic space structure that visitors may engage with.
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My Bedroom in Prague
Forum Stadtpark Prag (1993)
curated by Elisabeth Fiedler
May 1993, Prague, Krakovska 3. Behind the sign on the door, “Kechner,” is a fully furnished apartment known as “Forum Stadtpark Prague” rented by the Austrian Forum Stadtpark Graz as a residence, working, and exhibition space for invited artists. The entrance room is used as exhibition space; the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom are available as living space for artists. The space between the entrance door and the following door forms a sort of mini-entrance hall through which one reaches the actual entrance room.[…]
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