Curated by Silvia Eiblmayr

• 12.05.–18.06.2011

Fade Up / Flash Back stands for the fading up of spotlights, the highlighting of an issue while also flashing back and tracing an arc to both the more recent past and the past that reaches further back in history. Sanja Iveković (Croatia), Flaka Haliti (Kosovo) and Hannes Zebedin (Austria) are connected by a common interest in political issues that they link to questions on the relation between the public and the private sphere. The project’s umbrella title EAST BY SOUTH WEST also forms the geopolitical starting point of the selected works which deal with social aspects and partly with historical events that also include wars and their consequences.

In her work, Sanja Iveković takes a reflexive and critical look at state television (Looking At, 1974) or newspaper articles (Bitter Life, Novi Zagreb. People Behind Windows, 1975–76) that seeks to transform the two media’s ideological messages. In her work Novi Zagreb. People Behind Windows, Iveković used a black and white press photo of a Tito parade and coloured those windows of the grid-structured modernist façade of a residential house in the classic colour combination of red, blue or yellow behind which people were standing despite a general ban during such events.

Flaka Haliti represents a young female generation that puts up for discussion her status as an artist in her male-dominated country. In her video work Our Death, Others’ Dinner (2006) Haliti deals with the trauma of people disappearing during war and relates it to the question of how those victims are once again objectified for the purpose of political manipulation. The photo series Chain Reaction, which also serves as a metaphor for the young state, shows a diving platform on which young people are crowded together, waiting for their turn.

In his recently produced wall installation called Still. Silhouettes Movement Buenos Aires — Carinthian Partisans (2011), Hannes Zebedin addresses a repressed chapter in Austrian history, the partisan struggle of Carinthian Slovenes against Nazi military forces. By referring to the Argentinian protest movement’s practice, Zebedin copied the body contours of Partisan fighters directly onto kraft paper. In the video Untitled (2009) Zebedin follows a street demonstration in Italy from a specific perspective: his camera exclusively captures a dog that accompanies the crowd of protesters.

Text: Silvia Eiblmayr