Short Hills Grazer Kunstverein, Graz – curated by Eva Maria Stadler
Short Hills
Grazer Kunstverein, Graz
November 1999–January 2000
Collection Dieter and Gertraud Bogner at mumok
Exhibition views:
Susanne Stadler
Grazer Kunstverein
»The act one does, the act one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene« writes Judith Butler about the contingency of act and history. As Yvonne Volkart has already emphasized in her essay on Dorit Margreiter, the aspect of the performative is essential in dealing with questions of identity and the construction of gender. If one presumes that »acts« take place before action, the question of the original, of a fixed ascription, becomes superfluous. For the potential of the mutable is found in the repetition and re-staging of a situation. Dorit Margreiter manifests this permanent transformation in her video installation Short Hills through a dense interweaving of interviews, excerpts from TV series, the sound of the German dubbing voices, camera pans through Short Hills and a photo of Hong Kong. Short Hills tells of the interplay of personal experience – she interviews her aunt and her cousin, who emigrated from Hong Kong to Short Hills, New Jersey – and public reception through the medium of television.
The set-up of the exhibition consists of a spatial structure based on Friedrich Kiesler's “T + L system” and a model platform depicting the topographical landscape of Short Hills. The technical devices that project the video and a DVD, which Dorit Margreiter calls »material«, are on this model landscape. Architectural drawings of the Chang family's newly planned house and a monitor displaying her aunt's favorite Chinese soap opera complete the scenario. Video and exhibition form two levels for the perception of performance, which is located in the film between acting and documentation, and for the visitors' participation within the stage-like framework of the exhibition.[…]
Text by Eva Maria Stadler