Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Währinger Straße 59, 2nd Staircase, 1st Floor, 1090 Wien
19 January - 3 March 2012. Opening on 18 January, 19h.
Works in the Exhibition
Konstantinos Manolakis (CH)
Konstantinos Manolakis is a representative of the younger generation of Zurich artists. He experiments in his artistic practices with the methods of Constructivism and Minimal Art – not only in terms of abstraction and invention, but also of the interrelation between the constructions, the objects on display, the viewer's walking movements in the space and their changing perspective. The artist's constructions cause familiar spatial conventions to sway. His approach is characterized not only by deconstruction, but can be seen as new forms of territorialization in which the artist intervenes in the space building an architecture within the architecture, which introduces new temporalities in the relation between the space, the installation and the viewer.
White Screen (2011)
Spatial sculptural installation, diverse media
As a starting point for his installation, the artist takes sequences of Wim Wender's film Kings of the Road, a film dealing with the ruins of representation and the limits of intersubjective communication. On the advertizing panel at the entrance of a cinema in which no films are projected any longer, the words White Screen remain shining. On a first formal level the work is concerned with the issue of absence, emptiness, the white screen as a void, as the point with the highest concentration of potentialities, yet marked by complete indifference and innocence, as a witness to projections that may have taken place. The white screen can be seen on the one hand as a physical limitation of the field of vision, yet with the ambivalence between its materiality and the symbolic marking and formatting of the locus of the virtual, it is also an entrance to the virtual, an extension of the mental field, where fragmented memories are gathered in order to construct the linear structure of recollection. The white screen's emptiness is confronted to that of the blind spot in which there is no focus, no image, the emptiness between you and you that cannot be crossed – what prevents you from knowing yourself; that incommensurability in which you are confronted with your own limitedness.
On another level the installation deals with a certain desynchronization in the translation between the materiality and its textures, virtuality and textuality, and their relation to space-time. The artist takes the linear projection apart into the film's components of virtual white screen, image, sound, translated subtitles, and looks at how the totality of meaning is organized between these structures in the unity between them, transgressing the limitedness of the different structures and opening up a multiplicity of meaning.
White Screen (2011)
Spatial sculptural installation, diverse media
Courtesy the artist