Hollerer/Marte. Do we need to have an accident

The exhibition Hollerer/Marte brings together Austrian filmmaker and performance artist Sabine Marte (1967)—winner of last year's Diagonale prize for innovative filmmaking—and internationally acclaimed Austrian sculptor Clemens Hollerer (1975). They share a conceptual approach to deconstructing existing situations and an interest in the conditions and effects of a medium. This is the 5th collaborative project with Diagonale—Festival of Austrian Film, and once again the format is new. This time, there will be an exhibition in Space02 at the Kunsthaus Graz, which works as overall dialogue project involving two artists. Clemens Hollerer's installations will span the space around Sabine Marte's film projections, exploiting its dimensions and set-up to create a situation where three-dimensional montage techniques and film montage techniques will fuse into an overall image of emotional recollection.

The process involves a few cubic metres of wood, found footage of Hollywood film clips, over 30 tins of paint, filmed projections, plastic sheeting, nylon straps, construction nets, personal videos, scraps of language and noises. These are developed into a narration of cross-fades and montages involving films, installations and visitors whose effect is to unsettle, box in, attack and yet intoxicate aesthetically. Deconstructed into their component parts, conditions of perception can be discerned that are downrightsurreal and address several senses at once.

Clemens Hollerer's three-dimensional installations can be traced back to existing urban situations that, translated into the given exhibition context, become a kind of ABC of the space being given a workover. Antecedents and standardised prefabrications interact. Patterns and demarcation lines become manifest in their repetition.

Sabine Marte likewise works with repetition, discontinuity and linguistic/visual/ acoustic commentary that impacts in its ruthless deconstruction of the original. The trailer of Diagonale 2011, which bears the same title as the exhibition, is an edited dialogue between man and woman put together from Hollywood film clips. Just like the exhibition itself, this lures us into parallel places, admitting a moment of cognition that is both critical and funny in its daring confrontations.

Musings on the topic of psycho-social spaces in this exhibition thus introduce the subject of the exploration of knowledge spaces as an aspect of museums generally—the Kunsthaus Graz theme for 2011.

Clemens Hollerer / Sabine Marte
"Do we need to have an accident?"
Kurator: Katrin Bucher Trantow