opening: Friday, 21st March, 7 PM / with the performance by Jakob Lena Knebl & Thomas Hörl

Artists: Anita Frech and Jakob Lena Knebl

curated by: Pia Jardí

exhibition will last till 18.05.2014

The exhibition presents the photographic work of two Austrian artists: Anita Frech (St. Pölten, 1973) and Jakob Lena Knebl (Vienna, 1970). The two artists work using their own bodies plus wrapping as stages for their shows. Jakob Lena’s work deals with questions of gender, while Anita Frech uses elements and codes that allude to the “feminine domain” for the construction of her photographic settings, but within this exhibition their artistic practices are presented for the first time from a different perspective. Their work is associated and interpreted as a symptom and artistic elaboration of that vast social and cultural phenomena that dominates contemporary materialistic and consumer culture: fashion.

In Anita Frech´s stage-settings, clothing and architecture form a unity. The artist uses compositional means, such as the curtains she places at the back part of the settings, making them interact with the clothing that, in the style of the Venetian folds “à la Fortuny”, marks the anatomy of the body that emerges or hides behind it. The expressive possibilities of the folds of tissue, the volume of which the artist accentuates with colour spots, may be viewed as being similar to those of pictorial compositions. In the exhibition, photographs appear in which the absence-presence of the body – fragmented, distorted or cut like part of a collage – is presented, with unsettling beauty, as part of a show.

The portraits of the performer Jakob Lena Knebl wearing different costumes and make-up are constructions of a different “me” which, using humour and irony, subvert and transgress traditional codes of male/female gender. In his/her works, he/she plays with notions of sensuality and hedonism, but also with grotesque and monstrosity, making references to the artistic avant-gardes and those of variété-theatre, from Bauhaus to Mickey-Mouse… In this way she produces a large variety of “me” which appears as ephemeral and changing, and amplifies and extends the notion of identity which is absorbed by the multiplicity of its representations.

Jakob Lena Knebl and Anita Frech place symbols and characteristics proper to the language of fashion in their photographs, interacting consciously with some of its codes. The two artists use their own bodies with different props and stage elements to compose each one of their images. Using formulas that have evolved from those used in the sixties and seventies by feminist artists, who employed their own bodies as a “direct weapon” of their demands, as well as later suggestions connected to post-structuralism that recognize the gender identities shaped within society and language, the body plus packaging of the images presented in the exposition are a part of an elaborate mise en scène that is similar to what one sees in sophisticated fashion photography. In a way identical to today´s fashion shows, which are conceived more to be captured with mobile devices than for the event itself, the images shown in the exhibition are constructed in a way to immediately attract the viewer´s gaze. They are as attractive as they are forceful and striking, provoking an immediate emotional reaction. It’s a pure advertising effect.

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