Pavilion 53rd Biennale di Venezia, Austrian Pavilion – curated by VALIE EXPORT and Silvia Eiblmayr
Pavilion
53rd Biennale di Venezia, Austrian Pavilion
curated by VALIE EXPORT and Silvia Eiblmayr
June–November 2009
– Pavilion (2009), 35mm, b/w, silent, 8min
Collection Austrian Gallery Belvedere
Installation views:
@ Hertha Hurnaus
53rd Biennale di Venezia, Austrian Pavilion 2009
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. In her work, the pavilion becomes the setting for diverse interactions in which the artist visually merges the building’s interior and exterior, thus restoring its status as a prototype exhibition space. Pavilion is a spatial exploration of the pavilion’s inherent representational aspects, a visual scanning of the space. Several points of view come to the fore here: first, the pavilion as a utopian space for art that is itself an architectural sculpture; second, the exhibition and its substructure; third, the pavilion as stage for a performance and its documentation; and finally—self-reflexively—a consideration of the medium of film itself.
As a film, Pavilion consists of a sequence of room views, each furnished with different materials and figures. Projected onto a suspended screen installed a few inches off the wall, the film shows a series of modular spaces that guide the audience’s gaze into a nested spatial continuum. Abstract and surreal shapes, surfaces, and figures from the past flicker across the screen only to disappear seconds later. Like a kaleidoscope, and without foregrounding the camerawork involved, the film blurs the boundaries between memory, perception, and imagination within the force field between media and actual physical presence. The formal dynamics are the result of a slick immediacy contrasted with a surreal, grainy black-and-white aesthetic.[…]
excerpt from Barbara Clausen Dorit Margreiter. Pavilion, in Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter, Franziska and Lois Weinberger. La Biennale di Venezia 2009