The Secession sees its significance as a historically important artists' association as a mission to regard itself not only as an exhibition location again in 2002, but also as a location for the production of contemporary fine art. For this reason, all the projects are created in the context of the architectonic and contextual conditions of the house and the political and geographical circumstances of its location; artistic approaches that are yet to be discovered have a close, ideally enriching relationship to already established positions. The three main pillars of classical art – painting, sculpture and architecture – serve the majority of the invited artists as a mental foundation, from which they develop their projects and position them within the contemporary discourse. Artists working in other media are also equally characterized by their courage to experiment, their dedication to art that is often complicated, demanding a high degree of open-mindedness and capability for critical thinking on the part of the viewers. All the programmatic decisions of the Secession are made by the artists elected to the board of directors, Manfred Erjautz, Matthias Herrmann, Johanna Kandl, Sandrine von Klot, Willi Kopf, Hans Kupelwieser, Dorit Margreiter, Anna Meyer, Constanze Ruhm, Martin Walde and Heimo Zobernig; for the first time in the history of the institution, there are more women represented in solo and group exhibitions than male artists. All the exhibitions will be accompanied by a bilingual publication in German and English.
 

 
MANFRED ERJAUTZ
February 14 – April 14, 2002



The constant expansion of the concept of sculpture is the focal point of Manfred Erjautz' artistic thinking. With materials that are often taken from contexts alien to art, works are created that charge presumably familiar signs with new, unfamiliar meanings. The accumulatively used logos, robbed of their original signal effect, refer to a possible void of aesthetic codes and the place that an imaginary counterpart must assume in search of sense and nonsense. Erjautz' exhibition project for the Secession will deal with the interplay of inside and outside, distance and nearness, but also especially with the transformation of the private to the public and vice versa.
Manfred Erjautz, born 1966, lives and works in Vienna.

 
HIER IST DORT 2
February 14 – April 14, 2002
 


In an international group exhibition, Hier ist Dort 2 picks up a discussion about the determination of locations and the impossibility of assuming them and reverts this discussion back to the medium of painting. The path between places – between here and there, between the viewer and the picture – is a process, often a predetermined one, that raises the question of how visualization processes work in a society characterized by media, and which methods and strategies painting offers for investigating this.
In both the interior and the exterior space of the Secession, the exhibition conceived by Anna Meyer shows works by Tim Gardner, Ellen Harvey, Hildegard Joos, Michael Krebber, Marko Lulic, Lisa Milroy, Katrin Plavcak, Melanie Smith, Andreas Siekmann, Esther Stocker and Amelie von Wulffen.

 
AYSE ERKMEN
April 25 – June 23, 2002
 

Ayse Erkmen, Eudora, 2001

In the past ten years, many artists have undertaken a revision of the genre of site-specific installations as an expansion of the categories of architecture, sculpture, picture and language. Ayse Erkmen is one of the most important representatives of this artistic praxis. Her associative works cannot be reduced to characteristic materials or aesthetics, but rather there is a high degree of flexibility inherent to them. In her outdoor and indoor installations, Erkmen transforms everyday, often unnoticed social and architectonic moments into a minimalist grammar of form. These conceptual interventions are based on an analytical sensibility and thus open up complex narrative structures.
Ayse Erkmen lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul.

 
TRINA ROBBINS
April 25 – June 23, 2002
 

Odin Burvick, Dickie Dara, ca. 1947

The cartoonist, author and pop historian Trina Robbins has been considered one of the most important female American cartoonists since the 60's. As early as 1972, she founded the "Wimmen's Comix Collective" with other draftswomen. In addition to her own production, Robbins has also documented the history of women's comics in the USA from a feminist perspective in numerous publications (including From Girls to Grrrlz – A History of American Women's Comics, from Teens to Zines, Chronicle Books 1999). The exhibition conceived for the Secession is based on Robbins' most recently published book, The Great Women Cartoonists (2001). An extensive selection of comics and original drawings provides an overview of the work of great women cartoonists of the 20th century, their concerns and networks. In addition, young women cartoonists will produce works especially for the exhibition.
Trina Robbins lives and works in San Francisco.

 
CAROLINA CAYCEDO
May 2002
 

Carolina Caycedo, O Carrinho Brica, O Carrinho Braque, 2001

Carolina Caycedo's works revolve around a special form of trade: in her street actions and process-oriented projects, she develops mobile "markets" for non-monetary barter transactions. For instance, Caycedo offers passers-by on the street the service of a new look in a temporary hairdressing and cosmetics salon in exchange for two photos of before and after the haircut. The mobile vehicles, just like the street museum, a constantly changing collection of objects for trading, which Caycedo established in 1998 as a member of the "Colectivo Cambalache" in Bogota, are stages for communication. At the same time, however, they also deal with informal economy as an effect of the capitalization and gentrification of urban regions.
Carolina Caycedo, born 1978, lives and works in London.


RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA
July 5 – September 1, 2002
 

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Das soziale Kapital, 1998

Rirkrit Tiravanija designs situation-related spaces for communication and interaction, which contain elements of work, service and common activities. With stages, platforms and meeting points, he invites visitors to actively use the art and living spaces he makes available and to participate in the social processes he initiates. His projects relate the ephemeral relevance of real human interaction to historical and spatial points of reference. They break through the expectations linked to their institutional surroundings and play with the dispositions of the private and the public, hospitality and service at the same time.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, born 1961, lives and works in New York, Bangkok and Berlin.
 

INES DOUJAK
July 5– September 1, 2002
 

Ines Doujak, Ohne Titel, 2001

A logical analysis of both historical and everyday mechanisms of exclusion permeates Ines Doujak's artistic work: racism in the form of constructions of ethnic identity, cultural reduction or gender attributes. Her photographically, perfomatively and installatively staged works are poetic and, at the same time, radical in their function of arousing clichés and the permanent positing of norms, yet without propagating them. Against the background that the image has predominated over writing in the history of racism (Paul Gilroy), the works communicate complex models of a critical language of image politics.
For the Secession, Doujak has developed a multi-part project on sexisms and heterosexist norms. One point of departure for the project is derived from the parade wagon productions from Christopher Street Day parades.
Ines Doujak, born 1959, lives and works in Vienna.


TRESPASSING – MOMENTE IN DER ARCHITEKTUR
September 13 – November 3, 2002
 


The organization and the appropriation of space are historically / ideologically contingent in their relationship to one another and thus mutable. The exhibition Trespassing seeks possibilities for transgressing given factors for establishing order and locates these less in the invention of utopian entities than in the integration of partial displacements. Through re-interpretations of both realized and only conceived projects, programmatic and spatial discontinuities are made manifest, interactions with social and subject conceptions become visible. Discussions with architects and theorists will be publicized before the exhibition and continued during it in the form of lectures.
Concept by ESCAPE*spHERE in cooperation with Angelika Fitz.
Project documentation: www.secession.at/trespassing


HENRIK HÅKANSSON
September 13 – November 10, 2002
 

Henrik Hakansson, Out of the Black into the Blue, 1997

Henrik Håkansson's works revolve around bio systems and ecosystems, microcosms of nature in the process of disintegration, and provisional biotopes in urbanized landscapes. In his experimental arrangements, which observe insects, amphibians, reptiles and others, motifs of a capitalization of nature and exploitative surveillance through control apparatuses come up again and again. Yet these constellations continuously elude an unequivocal categorization, alternating between environmental activism, scientific research, pop culture and art historical references. In their open topography, they do not form places of escape, neither in the aesthetic of the media (scientific) image nor in the figure of an idyllic landscape.
Henrik Håkansson, born 1968, lives and works in Galtaback and Berlin.


SUE WILLIAMS
November 22, 2002 – February 2, 2003
 

Sue Williams, Big Red O, 2001

In Sue Williams' work, questions relating to form and content in contemporary painting and drawing are posed parallel to one another and answered, yet without covering up or obscuring either of the two complexes. Whereas her early works had a concrete affinity to feminist principles and demands – dissolved in bursts of drawing and text in painting, but also in the unusually complex titles – in more recent productions, Williams expands both her vocabulary of ideas and the purely painterly vocabulary. The luxurious coloration, which is nevertheless reduced in scale, contrasts daring emptiness, "pure" yet simultaneously generous abstraction, allowing for a multitude of levels of meaning in the knowledge of the artist's wealth of work.
Sue Williams, born 1954, lives and works in New York.


KOO JEONG-A
November 22, 2002 – February 2, 2003
 

Koo Jeong-a, Snowy, Sunny Day, 1997

Koo Jeong-a creates small universes that make everyday live visible and yet transcend it at the same time. Her installations consist of objects such as leftover paper or sand, which refer to everyday actions, but which have become autonomous and no longer have a recognizable function. Located at the boundary of perception, her spatial arrangements invite one to discover the poetry of these thing-landscapes. Executing her work with great precision and meditative concentration, with minimal shifts of reality, Koo Jeong-a creates compositions that seem provisional, but in which nothing is random, so that they dissolve the border between order and disorder. In this, the necessity of caring about the things determines her sculptural actions.
Koo Jeong-a, born 1967, lives and works in Paris.


MICHAEL BEUTLER
November 22, 2002 – February 2, 2003


Michael Beutler, o.T., 2001

Beutler's constructions derive their structures from imprints taken from specific spaces. The transformation of the existing architecture, whether it is materially or spatially transposed, results in shifts that turn the form language of substances into content. His works take up a sculptural discourse of recent decades and continue its formulation at the same time in the treatment of topical themes – such as issues of globalization or urban life myths – and in the selection of materials that are reminiscent of trash and low-tech culture. In complex spatial sculptures, comprising not only semantic explorations of given exhibition architectures but also interventions in public space, the text of materiality often becomes part of temporary housing for the visitors.
Michael Beutler, born 1976, lives and works in Glasgow and Frankfurt am Main.

 
 
PERMANENT EXHIBITION
Gustav Klimt: THE BEETHOVEN FRIEZE
 
 
 
For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Pia Leydolt
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-10, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
E-mail: presse@secession.at