INES DOUJAK SALE. 2 February to 21 May 2018

Transcription

1 INES DOUJAK SALE 2 February to 21 May 2018

2 INES DOUJAK. SALE 2 February to 21 May 2018 The Large Hall of the LENTOS is transformed into a fashion store! The Austrian artist Ines Doujak presents her highly unusual fashion collections. The exhibition space mutates temporarily into a changing room: visitors are welcome to touch, try on and take pictures. Citing and at the same time calling into question the glamour of the fashion world, Doujak s works are characterized both by their determined criticism and their beauty. The artist brings into play the exploitative structures and the gender and class order hardwired into haute couture and the garment industry and deliberately blurs the demarcation line separating fashion statement and art. Ines Doujak reckons with the intrinsic power of images in developing her own compelling formal language. In doing so, she combines elements of collage with historical and political research, as the exhibition s curator, LENTOS director Hemma Schmutz, points out. The exhibition "Ines Doujak. SALE "offers art to touch and try on. The LENTOS becomes a place where visitors can experience works of art in the truest sense of the word. Anyone who has the curiosity and the courage to try things out, expects an exhibition experience outside the norm, says Doris Lang- Mayerhofer, cultural councilor of the city of Linz, enthusiastic about the concept. The focus is on textile workers burnt to death in their factories, on total exhaustion as the lot of men and women in the low-wage sector, on dirty secrets, animal and human skins, Carnival and masquerade, drugs, war and the devil himself. Motifs and themes are directly inscribed on the textiles as carrier material. Fabrics, patterns, garments and accessories as well as texts, publications, objects, videos, dance interludes and pieces of music deal with the links between fashion, colonialism and globalized relations of production. The show at the LENTOS lays claim to a great deal of the museum s available space, from the foyer and the stairwell to the Great Hall on the upper floor. It comprises altogether seven collections, dating to the years 2012 to 2018, that address the dark side of the fashion industry. The exhibition s opening day will see the video work A Mask Is Always Active (part of the Carneval collection) projected on to the museum s façade. The exhibition is based on Loomshuttles / Warpaths, an artistic-scientific research project that has already been going on for many years. The project includes Doujak s eccentric archive, which traces the history of globalisation on the evidence of textiles from the region of the Andes. For this purpose, the archive also enlists the service of an open-ended series of posters, sculptures, performances and texts, which is very much a work in continual progress. Having initially committed herself to the analysis, handling and processing of existing materials, Ines Doujak then proceeded to developing her own 2

3 materials and having garments fashioned from them. Parts of this steadily evolving fashion collection were already on display in the exhibition Not Dressed for Conquering at Stuttgart s Württembergischer Kunstverein and in Masterless Voices at the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Kracow. The exhibition at the LENTOS is accompanied by the publication of Loomshuttles, Warpaths. An Eccentric Archive , with texts in English by Ines Doujak and John Barker, produced in collaboration with the Württembergischer Kunstverein. 3

4 WORKS The Devil Opens a Night School (Foyer, Main Hall) A tent made from a specifically designed material, the pattern of which consists of bleeding horses, rotting grapes, and scorched wood, serves as the location for the devil s night school. The pattern on the screens and on the items of clothing is reminiscent of drops of blood. In the video installation the devil opens a night school to teach the secrets of success and failure. The circulating school began in the Ukraine and in Spain, countries in which crisis, violence of profit, and the resulting collapse are directly felt. The business of war and drugs is shown through the figure of the devil, in his many forms and names. Carnival (Passage between the main hall and the collection, Main Hall) To confuse rather than hide: In WWI the British Navy painted wild geometric shapes on thousands of ships to protect them from submarines. The pop-up store as well as the dolls are covered in the same camouflage patterns. In some cultures body movements, film, and song are often directly translated into patterns on textiles, in which the colors go to war with each other, or are at least in conflict. Held up by a musical off-beat these patterns shake the fringes and seams, which they see as an expression of an order that must be broken, says Doujak. The video A Mask Is Always Active is a musical on carnival, utopia, and rebellion. It begins with a singing mountain, that was first scaled by European explorers on the backs of indigenous porters. The mountain has had enough of the robbery of its riches and the exploitation of the humans working inside it. And so the mountain begins its jour e to the car ival Ownerless voices sing unforgiving songs in the darkness. Some people regret that they are not dressed to conquer. A brazen researcher, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed in camouflage, blends with the carnival folk like a group of Dança do Ombrinho dancers. Fires (Main Hall) Images of flames, chains, and naked human bodies are printed onto bales of cloth and onto clothing. Burns and burn wounds are a daily part of life for seamstresses in textile factories in so-called low-wage countries. In order to keep up with the extremely tightly calculated time schedules, voluntary over-time is the norm, and in some cases the factories gates are simply locked. However, the image of fire is not only used metaphorically for the textile factories that go up in flames due to missing security standards or the burn-out of the modern-day wage-slaves. It is also a reference to the workers who set 4

5 the factories or even themselves on fire in protest. The 22-year-old textile worker Chun Tae-il set himself on fire in 1970 in protest of the blatant exploitation of the mostly female textile workers in the industrial area of Seoul. We are not machines! he called out as he burnt. The audio file in the exhibition contains an interview with his sister, the union activist Dr. Chun Soon-ok. Dirty Secret (Main Hall) Various patterns can be seen on the items of clothing and notebooks displayed in the pop-up store. The stories behind these patterns were literally woven into them. In the context of an long-term artistic research called Loom Shuttles, Warpaths, Doujak investigated the interplay of textiles, clothing, and colonialism. The artist collected woven, knitted, or embroidered textiles from the Andes. In that area textiles have a very high significance. Textiles from that region are shaped by an imperialist history, by oppression, and by resistance: In the midst of the sharply cut black square the dirty secret of thousands of years of patterns can be found, as Doujak says. Booklets entitled Fatal Obstacles or Dangerous Elegance critically remind us of the colonialist past. Transport (Stairwell, Main Hall) The installation Transport consists of multiple parts: wooden boxes, various objects (e.g. a necklace on which the conjuror s rabbit is chained that deconstructs the fiction of comparative advantage in free trade (Doujak), collages that show porters, and a collection of bags). Images of porters are also printed on the bags. In many parts of the world cargo is often still transported by human porters despite the possibility of using various mechanical equipment. Due to free trade agreements, low transportation costs, and technical development in logistics (such as bar codes or container ships), textile production is becoming increasingly globalized. Retail chains and fashion brands intentionally look for low-income areas for their production. Kriminalaffe (Main Hall) The items of clothing, as well as a number of objects, such as a folding screen and a rocking chair, are covered with prints of monkeys and humans found on the internet. A shawl printed with the words Class Hatred hints at the connection of social origin and racialization. People with darker skin are portrayed as monkeys modern racism has its own iconography. F. W. Taylor also claimed to see a comparison between human beings and monkeys, in that 5

6 he described workers in 1911 as intelligent gorilla, who try their best to do as little as possible, without it being noticed. The title Kriminalaffe is taken from the children s book Kasperglück und Löwenreise by Janosch. The Kriminalaffe sees how he is turning into a monkey the more he imitates himself. Skins (Main Hall ceiling, Annex Room) The series Skins is centered around collages made from extracts of historical botanical boards and atlases on skin diseases. Fantasy creatures are created by combining illustrations of disease symptoms, drawings of inner organs, but also representations of animals. Not least of all, the sicknesses refer to European colonization, where the Europeans brought diseases with them into the colonies killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous inhabitants. A sculpture carrying a bouquet of psychedelic plants casts a shadow on the collages hanging on the wall. It is a reference to a time of colonial expansion, in which ecstatic altered states of mind were banned in European society. The ceiling of the main hall is covered in a textile pattern, the space left free is the shape of a human skin, defining the exhibition space. Looters (Main Hall) The paper-maché figures wear camouflage pants, vintage sweaters, hoodies, or face masks, and by doing so they are being true to their name. They steal and present themselves as militant. Some of them could not care less about bourgeois etiquette as shown by their obscene gestures. The protest against the capitalist system led to a radicalization in the case of these looters. The question is raised, who decides who can consume, and who can t? Who has the right to judge the poor? Who steals from whom, and who can afford to live within the limits of the law. 6

7 BIOGRAPHY Ines Doujak, born in Klagenfurt in 1959, is a graduate of the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In addition to the fashion industry, the artist examines in her conceptual work stereotypes in the fields of gender roles and racism. Solo exhibitions (selection) 2017 Masterless Voices, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, Krakow 2016 Not Dressed for Conquering, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart 2015 Not Dressed for Conquering, Johann Jacobs Museum Zurich 2007 Ines Doujak, Galerie Krobath, Vienna 2005 Dirty Old Women, Salzburger Kunstverein 2002 Father Ass, Vienna Secession Group exhibitions (selection) th Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh 2017 The Conundrum of Imagination. On the Paradigm of Exploration and Discovery, Leopold Museum, Vienna Stealing from the West, Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne 2016 Peace-Treaty, San Sebastian (Cultural City of Art) Sans peau / No Skin, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, QC 2015 School of Kiev, Kiev-Biennale All Men Become Sisters, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz Die Bestie und ist der Souverän, MACBA (Museu d Art Contemporani Barcelona), Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart wow! Woven? Entering the (sub)textiles, Künstlerhaus. Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz Share Too Much History, More Future, Museum of Contemporary Art Banja Luka 2014 Ejemplos a seguir! Expediciones en estética y sostenibilidad, Museo Metropolitano de Lima, Lima 7

8 Utopian Pulse Flares in the Darkroom, Vienna Secession 31ª São Paulo Biennale Exampels to follow!, Zollverein, Essen Ten Million Rooms of Yearning Sex in Hong Kong, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong th October Salon. No one belongs here more than you, Belgrade Cultural Center, Belgrade Acts of Voicing, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul 2012 re.act.feminism #2. A Performing Archive: Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Museet for Samtidskunst, Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb Acts of Voicing, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart Busan Biennale 2012, Busan, South Korea Reflecting Fashion, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, MUMOK, Wien 2010 Principio Potosí (Das Potosi-Prinzip): Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museo Nacional de Arte La Paz, Bolivien Trienale Linz 1.0, Contemporary Art in Austria, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz 2008 Peripheral Vision and Collective Body, MUSEION, Bozen 2007 documenta 12, Kassel 2004 Be What You Want, But Stay Where You Are, Witte de With, Rotterdam Die Regierung. Paradiesische Handlungsräume, Vienna Secession 2003 How do we want to be governed?, MACBA (Museu d Art Contemporani Barcelona) Being in the World, Miami Art Central, Miami 2000 Things we don't understand, Generali Foundation, Vienna Erlauf Remembers, Erlauf 8

9 Austrian Science Fund Doujak received two research grants from the Austrian Science Fund Loomshuttles / Warpaths ( ), an extensive study of textiles to investigate their global history characterized by cultural, class, and gender conflict ; and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom (together with Oliver Ressler ) which resulted in an exhibition in the Secession, Vienna (2014) and a publication (Pluto Press, London). 9

10 PROGRAM EVENTS BLUE PRINT WORKSHOP DEVIL'S FOOD Sunday, 29 April, 10 am 4 pm Ban unique patterns in blue print on fabric. Get to know the blue dyeing of fabrics with the Zeugfärberei Gutau and try it yourself. The workshop also includes the lecture Devil's Food. Costs: (including admission fee), max. 15 participants, registration at claudia.kern@lentos.at, T , at the latest one week before the appointment. LECTURE DEVIL S FOOD Sunday, 29 April, 2 pm Ines Doujak and John Barker will give a lecture on the cultural background and history of the color Indigo, in German and English. open to the public, free admission for lecture-visitors (admission fee for the exhibitions not included), no registration required GUIDED TOURS PUBLIC GUIDED TOUR every Thursday, 7 pm duratio hour, costs, e clusive ad issio, ger a o l additional Dates: Sun 4 & 11 February, 4 pm Tue 6 & 13 February, 4 pm GUIDED TOUR WITH THE CURATOR Thursday 22 February, 7 pm with Hemma Schmutz, german only FLASHLIGHT GUIDED TOUR 3 February, at 4 pm i e glish, duratio Mi,, o ad issio fee GUIDED TOUR FOR DEAF MUSEUM VISITORS Saturday 5 May, 4 pm with sign language interpreter admission and guided tour free for deafs 10

11 PRESS IMAGES Press Images are available for download at Free use of press images only in conjunction with the relevant exhibition. Ines Doujak, Looter, exhibition view Masterless Voices (detail), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Krakow, 2017, photo: Studio FilmLOVE exhibition view Masterless Voices, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Krakow, 2017, photo: Studio FilmLOVE Ines Doujak, from the series Skins,

12 Ines Doujak, from the series Skins (draft), 2016 Ines Doujak, Untiteld, 2013 Ines Doujak, Transport, fabric design (detail), 2014 Ines Doujak, Looter, exhibition view Stealing from the West, Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne,

13 Ines Doujak, John Barker The Devil Opens a Nightschool, 2015, video still Ines Doujak, John Barker, A Mask is Always Active, 2014, video still exhibition view Masterless Voices, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Krakow, 2017, photo: Studio FilmLOVE exhibition view Ines Doujak. Sale, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 2017 photo: mascheks. exhibition view Ines Doujak. Sale, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 2017 photo: mascheks. 13

14 exhibition view Ines Doujak. Sale, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 2017 photo: mascheks. exhibition view Ines Doujak. Sale, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 2017 photo: mascheks. exhibition view Ines Doujak. Sale, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 2017 photo: mascheks. exhibition view Ines Doujak. Sale, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 2017 photo: mascheks. 14

15 Exhibition Title INES DOUJAK. SALE Exhibition Period 2 February to 21 May 2018 Opening Press Conference Exhibition Venue Curator Exhibits Publication Exhibition Architecture Opening Hours Thursday, 1 February, 7 pm Thursday, 1 February, 10 am Foyer, Stairwell, Main Hall Hemma Schmutz fabrics, cuts, clothes, accessories, texts, texts, objects, videos The exhibition is accompanied by the publications Warpaths. An Eccentric Archive (price: ) with texts by Ines Doujak and John Barker published by Spector Books and the fashion magazine SALE. In English Language. In cooperation with the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. All publications can be purchased in the LENTOS Shop or at lentos.at/shop Mateusz Okonski Tue Sun 10 am to 6 pm, Thur 10 am to 9 pm, Mon closed (except 2.4. und ) Open on public holiday 1.4., 1.5., and Admission, co cessio s 6 Press Contact Web & Social Media Clarissa Ujvari Tel. +43(0)732/ clarissa.ujvari@lentos.at Ernst-Koref-Promenade Linz lentos.at facebook.com/lentoslinz twitter.com/lentoslinz instagram.com/lentoslinz #lentosdoujak 15