Gregor Zivic

• 06.12.2006–20.01.2007

From 6 December 2006 until 20 January 2007, Galerie Martin Janda is showing new photographs, installations and films by Gregor Zivic. Three groups of objects supply the narrative structure in Zivic’s third exhibit at the gallery.

In the first gallery space there is an old wardrobe which contains numerous monitors in a variety of sizes. All of the screens show the same video, similar to one from a surveillance camera, of a rubber-pellet gun in motion. The back side of the wardrobe flings out a photograph: it depicts a densely composed, constructed scene and also constitutes a link to Gregor Zivic’s work on Gert Voss’s portrait for the Burgtheater Wien. But the person who was to be portrayed is missing from the photograph, and the alter ego only makes an appearance in a mirror hanging on the wall behind the wardrobe. While the portrait of Voss still places the relationship between actor and private individual, as well as between two artists, in foreground, through the installation’s spatial extension the link is generalised and, at the same time, attention is shifted to the alter ego phenomenon.

Two white tubes, each four metres long, connect the gallery spaces. The video Paletzgasse, 2006, which can be viewed on a monitor in one of the tubes, provides some insight with respect to these two oversized pistol barrels: Here the artist picks up on the relationship — as in earlier photographs — to his alter ego. The eye of the beholder is guided simultaneously to a wall sculpture — the same one encountered in the film — of a chamber made of wood strips containing a chair and a lectern. Their exact function is still open to interpretation, and the film divulges few clues. In the exhibit this sculpture is combined with a small projection screen which presents a small-format portrait of Gert Voss after all.

On the gallery’s upper floor Zivic takes elements from his installation Bob’s Pistol Building and places them in a new context. Taking large-format draft photographs as point of departure, as well as the film by the same name, he presents works which have sprung from this “encroaching” installation, or served as their defining moment.