30. June 2022
The material in the moving image, the cinematic as the high mass of sensual movement: With a retrospective of Katrina Daschner’s work from the past 25 years, the Kunsthalle Wien is staging what is probably the most aesthetic exhibition since the leadership trio WHW took over. Unlike the title Burn & Gloom! Glowing & Moon! Thousand Years of Troubled Genders” suggests, the new show in the dark invites you to reflect on gender images and forms in an almost contemplative way.
With the exception of a few objects, which are found in an entrance area defined by the artist as a “making-of-zone”, the focus is on the image in its static, but primarily its moving form. Daschner, who was born in Hamburg and has been living and working in Vienna for a quarter of a century, originally started with collages, but has now primarily discovered film as a language.
“I have found my home in the cinematic,” emphasized the artist on Thursday at the presentation of her retrospective. Here she is concerned with the moments of the tactile, the haptic, which are transported from the material world into the cinematic image: “It’s about touching something with your eyes.” At the same time, sensuality and meaningfulness are fused.
Starting out from the queer-feminist aesthetics of the underground, Daschner’s cinematic works have meanwhile arrived at a macro-optical high-gloss look in the style of Tom Ford. She skilfully opens up access to her oeuvre without revealing its content. Forms from nature, animals and humans are fused on an equal footing, underground and underwater world form a line in which non-binary reproductive jellyfish form a hierarchical unit with the well-known topos of indefinable body parts.
A film series, the inspirational basis of which was Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle”, was most recently followed by “Golden Shadow”, a more open work that even has narrative fragments in the dialectical split screen. However, this is not about a linear narration, but rather a rampant network of associations. “My narration is that of a coral that grows in all directions,” says Daschner.
For her, the view of these 25 years of an artistic journey holds promise, especially in times like these, curator Övül Ö mused. Durmuşoğlu about Daschner’s work: “Even in moments of darkness there is the opportunity to be different.”
Katrina Daschner: Burn & Gloom! Glowing & Moon! Thousand Years of Troubled Genders” at the Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna from June 30 to October 23. Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Thursday until 9 p.m. kunsthallewien.at