Vienna, April 4 – June 18 (Moulene) – June 25 (Barba + Faruqee), https://www.secession.at/
It has been five years since my last visit to the Secession. I had some memories and some preconceptions about this space. The art there was not easy. It was very conceptual. And the curators/director seemed to have a liking for sculptures from everyday materials, architectural-style interventions and old style film-strip and slide projectors. In fact this was not the taste of a single curator/director, but of a whole group of artists participating in an association that stands behind the programming. The current exhibitions manifested a continuation of the expected, similar but not same.
Jean-Luc Moulene’s sculptural installation in the central largest space made use of very simple construction materials and found objects. The space was intersected by a continuous line of alternating black and neon yellow wooden planks aligned along the edges of the room, which remained to a big extent empty. A few small objects placed inside of the room amplified the feeling of emptiness that is usually expressed with “wtf” initials in the post-internet age.
Rosa Barba’s artwork was installed in the dark underground of the building, and it satisfied the film projector fetishists among Secession members and visitors. The extraordinary noise of the old film projectors, especially the 35 mm monster located in the final room left the strongest impression on me. The projected image in the last room showed a sequence of shots documenting wrapped paintings and sculptures in a museum storage. In other artworks the film strip became the main protagonist, a medium reborn as a decorative element slowly meandering between glass marbles in a lightbox. I understood that the use of projectors as well as the images from the storage all referred to the problematic of recording and interpreting history and memory.
Anoka Faruqee exhibited in the smallest space, a room located on the upper floor of the building. The paintings were hung in a very straightforward way and centered out along a horizontal axis. One had to think about the op-art precedents, Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, etc. I also had to think about the recent exhibition of Hungarian constructivist and op-art artworks at the Danubiana Museum. Faruqeee’s work was an update to the op-art tradition. Instead of constructing her visual grids, she produced the visual effect through a calculated use of large spatulas with jagged edges. This approach returned some unexpected expression into the otherwise very cool paintings, through small glitches and errors. Another post-internet reference would be the ubiquitous digital screen matrix and the moiré effects that emerge on it. This helped to explain the excitement over the human-touch traces left behind: While Vasarely and co searched for the perfect pattern, Faruquee somehow nostalgically tried to emulate and simultaneously escape the perfect digital screen pattern through her painting craft.
Generally speaking, all the members of the Secession artist’s association can’t be wrong, and thus the exhibition can’t be bad. I suspect there is some very Viennese type of humor or irony at play here. Once in a couple of years, it’s worth it to stop by to see how it’s going.