IOANA PAUN. NATALIA, TURN THE LIGHT ON

Ioana Păun focuses in her work on making visible the undocumented services performed by migrants, many of them unregistered aliens working for low pay in European households. In the project “Natalia, turn the light on” calorie counters are used to symbolically store the energy expended by the mainly illegal housekeeper and use it to turn on the light in the exhibition space. The light thus only works through migrant labor, and as soon as they stop working, darkness reigns. We are also showing in the exhibition Ioana Pa˘un’s film “Romania Enterprise,” which drafts a dystopian scenario of Romanian society, a society that is no longer conducted as a state but as a private enterprise.

Ioana Păun’s pieces are part of the EU project Performigrations, which has been co-organized by the Department of Media and Communications at Alpen Adria University in Klagenfurt and which seeks to open up new perspectives on migration, mobility and space through exchanges between academic institutions and the art world. In cooperation with the association lend| hauer, Klagenfurt will also feature the performative art project “Close to the skin,” with migrants performing under the direction of Ioana Pa˘un in a production at the Lendhafen harbor on June 26 at 7 pm.

A symposium hosted by the Department of Media and Communications titled “The Art of Migration:
Media, Performance and Everyday Life” will pursue questions such as ways in which art can make migration tangible in a new and different way. The all-day symposium will take place on June 29 at Kunstraum Lakeside and on June 30 in the Stiftungssaal at Alpen Adria University.

Curators: Nora Leitgeb, Hemma Schmutz