Neuer Kunstverein Wien presents new works by Claudia Märzendorfer.
At the centre of Märzendorfer’s work is her interest in the processual, the shifting, the dissolving and disappearing; the irretrievability of a fleeting moment that can only be inscribed in our memory and revived. While she has been working and experimenting for many years with materials associated with the idea of the impermanent, the uncontrollable: melting ice or flowing ink, her new work at NKW literally freezes time and the past.
With her sculptural installation PS at Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Märzendorfer refers to the history of the exhibition space, which was once a car showroom presenting the latest models of the German luxury sports car Porsche. Her exhaust cloud floating in the room evokes memories of the former use of the space. Fifty floating casts of oil canisters – some of which are delicately overdrawn with ink and made of ceramic material – intensify this reconstruction of the past. 12 framed sketches accompany the sculptural installation. PS denotes horsepower, speed, mobility, change. But PS also means the labelling of a text appendix and plays with this double meaning.
Märzendorfer’s installation decelerates time, indeed makes it stand still, and transports the viewer into an exhibition that appropriates the time format of extreme slow motion. With the absence of cars and her focus on their relics, Märzendorfer thematises the dialectic of presence and absence, mobility and immobility and reality and perception. The cloud of exhaust fumes from the emissions left behind, frozen into a sculpture, transports visitors, as Märzendorfer says, into the everyday or childhood phenomenon of seeing images in clouds. The invisible becomes visible.
As Bordieu taught us, the view of things depends on the viewer. Every culture, every person is part of the knowledge and opinion machine of social perception, as well as a number of other internal and external circumstances that are constantly changing and in motion due to the multitude of perceptions. Nothing is completed, no body, no knowledge, drive in drive out. Text: NKW/ CM