Reality Manifestos - Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Währinger Straße 59, 2nd Staircase, 1st Floor, 1090 Wien

19 January - 3 March 2012. Opening on 18 January, 19h.

kunsthalleexnergasse.wuk.at | www.realitymanifestos.info

Participants in the Exhibition

Marc Bauer, Sabina Baumann, Mareike Bernien & Kerstin Schroedinger, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Bogna Burska, Brice Dellsperger, Konstantinos Manolakis, Michele O'Marah, Cora Piantoni, Elodie Pong, "Schmale, Scheirl, Knebl Werke" (Toni Schmale, Hans Scheirl & Jakob Lena Knebl), Rebecca Ann Tess

With a performance at the opening by The Centre of Attention, and a sound performance and DJ set by DJ Sweatproducer (Anne Käthi Wehrli).

At the finissage on 3 March at 19h, Hans Scheirl will give a public interview to the curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition and symposium are curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Finissage: Public Interview with Hans Scheirl

Technologies of Avant-garde Queer Cinema

moderated by Dimitrina Sevova, curator of the exhibition

3 March, 19h, at Kunsthalle Exnergasse

Hans Scheirl. Photo by Michelle Martinoli, London 1998

There are many remarkable filmmakers in the history of avant-garde cinema. But few are those who have completely changed our perception about the cinema material and its aesthetic and political potential as a means of fighting the clarity and purity of the production, reproduction and circulation of images with unconventional passion. Among them Jack Smith, who during the 1960s introduced a new language transgressing the lenses of the ideological machine and its signified reality using self-exoticizing, orientalizing and other camp devices; and Hans Scheirl who since the 1980s went even further in destabilizing and distorting the economy of image construction to trash the coding and ordering apparatus of what is termed normal behavior, the oppressive norms and control of a schizophrenic consumerist capitalism, and gives the images a new material mode of existence. His cyborg protagonists go beyond good and evil with their polymorphly perverse appropriation of the technologies of image production, cutting up the totality of hegemonic representation and bending the polarized world system, normative patterns of behavior and the representative theater of oedipal power. They ruin the image of accepted subjective formations in order to open up a utopian horizon to a possible existence in relentless invention, driven by boundless flaming desiring machines beyond the confining formulas framing and producing our reality. (ds)

Public Theoretical Symposium

Museum Halls, WUK, Währinger Straße 59, 1090 Wien

19-20 January 2012

The first entirely detourned film in the history of cinema: Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

A film produced by the person listed here [Yeo Ban Yee], who naturally has no idea what has happened to his film. Let it be said: all films can be detourned: potboilers, Vardas, Pasolinis, Caillacs, Godards, Bergmans, as well as good spaghetti westerns and all commercials.

From: René Viénet, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

The theoretical symposium is organized in conjunction with the exhibition project of the same name, and serves to contextualize the exhibition and the artists' works and raise a public critical discussion among scholars, the artists and a broad audience. The exhibition and the theoretical symposium reflect upon each other in order to theorize the work of the artists and deepen the understanding of the topics and subjects addressed in the theoretical framework of the project, and issues concerning the relation between contemporary art and cinema.

The symposium is organized in collaboration with the Postgraduate Program in Curating, Zurich, www.curating.org. A special issue of the on-curating.org magazine on the exhibition and symposium will be published in June 2013 with expanded texts based on the lectures.

|>> Program of the Symposium