COLLAGE I

Dadaist and poet Tristan Tzara called the invention of the collage the most revolutionary moment in the development of painting and meant by that the fundamental break with established forms of artistic representation that it symbolised. Implicit to the technical processes of what comprises collage — gluing (Fr. coller), scratching, cutting, tearing, folding, mounting, assembling and de-composing etc. is the potential for radicality. While the papiers collés of the Cubists drew their sustenance from used, discarded and apparently banal sources, we are surrounded today with multiply reproduced, re-formatted and re-edited copies of constantly accumulating digital debris. The current focus of the Fotogalerie Wien will present four exhibitions and includes a wide spectrum of methods and processes used in collage in contemporary photo and video art. This renders the narrative and autopoietic strengths of this art form visible along with its innovatory energy as one of its fundamental and most evident characteristics, especially in relation to new technologies or spatial and sculptural expansions. The drift of the images is also always guided by energies that are anarchistic, driven by chance and play.

The first exhibition is dedicated to collage as an artistic method. Its consistent use is characteristic of the work of the participating artists. What do the collisions and layers of fragmentary images mean for our perception? How do interventions to the underlying materiality of the picture effect its contents? In the works that are being shown media-specific qualities of photography are taken to the extreme, principles of order and ways of handling pictures, user interfaces and archives are disclosed. Operations such as translation and abstraction are central here: over-painting and scoring of the photographic images distance them from their reproducibility; in-built picture interference subverts effects that the photographic medium itself generates, its indexicality and transparency, for example. The installation of various material and mediums as multi-perspective assemblages, not only expand the generally accepted notion of the photographic materiality but also its presentational form: the work and its surroundings begin to subvert one another; as viewers we become a part of events.