New Spaces Charim Gallery, Vienna
New Spaces
Charim Gallery, Vienna
June–July 2016
Installation views:
Hannes Boeck
Charim Gallery
High on a rocky promontory, set against the background of the ruddy mesas of Monument Valley, a rider turns his horse. He marks a legendary spot. The site has a special place in the canon of Hollywood’s repertoire of images. It is from here that John Wayne looked out over the magnificent panorama of the Colorado Plateau in ‘The Searchers’; it was here that John Ford—the most Brechtian of filmmakers (Straub/Huillet)—set his camera and panned over the Mittens and Merrick Butte. He shot nine films in Monument Valley and the spectacular lookout point bears his name: John Ford’s Point.
The borderlands between Utah and Arizona belong to the Navajo Nation Reservation and members of this, the second largest Indian community in the USA, were actors and extras in Ford’s westerns in the 1950s and still work as photo models for tourists.
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.
With her all-new works (2015/16)—film (installation), photographs, sculptures and exposures on paper—Margreiter has blazed an exciting trail through the gallery. She stages, orders, layers and stretches her subjects all across its spaces. The concern here is with the transfer zones between everyday life and exhibition space, the production of images and the consequences that the various forms of production and reproduction have on our perception.[…]
Text by Brigitte Huck
ArtForum Review