Exposition « Fleeting Territories »

The exhibition Fleeting Territories deals with a breaking topic: spaces and their geopolitical, ecological, and economic aspects.

Curators Maren Richter and Klaus Schafler present artistic investigative works about different disputed fields around the world: rights, law, politics, economy, but also emotions as well play a central role in the appropriation of territories. In addition, there are also factors such as climate change, neocolonialism, utopias, and mythologies. This artistic excursion leads to places like Albern Harbor in Vienna, where there is currently a collision of different interests, or sites of radical change such as deforested areas of Romania and a demolished Roma settlement on the outskirts of Madrid. The exhibition features national and international positions including Khvay Samnang, whose artworks are currently on show at documenta, as well as Peter Fend, Amy Balkin, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Studio Orta, RESANITA, and many others.

Since several years now curators Maren Richter and Klaus Schafler have been researching territories and transformation processes which are happening evermore rapidly. For Richter and Schafler, the connection between the words “fleeting” and “territory” creates an opportunity to see spatial coordinates as fluid values. As a result, it becomes clear just how much the visible and invisible changes in nature, cities, and land are subject to human influences. The exhibition features artistic investigative works on processes relating to “land use” and “land grabbing” and their juridical, political, economic, and emotional indicators.

At the same time, this showcase is dedicated to performative forms of expressions that search for narratives to thematise changing and disappearing territories and their geopolitical and economic agendas. In this context, climate change, lost habitats, neocolonialism, utopias, mythologies, but also unknown dimensions of time, space, and form enter into a complex dialogue about permeable, fragile spatial concepts and new landscapes of knowledge.

Artists : Adriana Arroyo (CRI), Amy Balkin (USA), Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan (ROU), Democracia (ESP), Peter Fend (USA), Grammar of Urgencies in collaboration with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber (AUT), Mikhail Karikis (GRC), Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli (NLD), Studio Orta (GBR/ARG), RESANITA (AUT), Khvay Samnang (KHM), Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch (AUT)

Fleeting Territories
29 September – 9 December 2017
Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna, Austria
More information on : www.kunstraum.net