10.12.2009–24.01.2010
Exhibition

Provisional Dwellers
Annual Exhibition 2009/10

Opening: December 9, 2009, 7 p.m.
The 3,000-euro Award of Sponsorship of the Province of Salzburg has been awarded to Birgit Pleschberger during the exhibtion’s opening ceremony.

Informal meetings with the artists, the curator, and the staff of the Kunstverein, coffee and tea, readings and performances
December 10 and 11, 2009, starting with 12 p.m.

Participants: ARTgenossen, Peter Haas,
Eva Heitzinger, Elisabeth Junger, Corinna Mayer, Claudia Märzendorfer, Stephanie Mold,
Birgit Pleschberger, Günter Puller,
Barbara Reisinger, Joyce Rohrmoser/Sina Moser, G. A. Starzmann

“Provisional Dwellers” proposed the visitors a playful, sometimes ironic, other times meditative and often participative environment. They were invited to join a conversation on the possible role of the Kunstverein as a place for exercising the community, a place which the members of this institution do not only share but also make welcoming and meaningful for a broader public. The artists who were taking part in the exhibition have brought forward their ideas on temporariness, mobility, fragility, displacement, however not mourning this current condition of our times, but showing its potential for engendering new hopes and expectations from each other.

In a general climate of individualism, isolation, distrust and surveillance, people retreat and barricade themselves behind their private walls, habits and, often, prejudices. Culture is consumed ritualistically and the spaces of conviviality are not many. Art, which should push boundaries, is instead more and more used to replicate social hierarchies.

“Provisional Dwellers” used the medium of the exhibition and the space of the Salzburger Kunstverein as a framework within which to rehearse hospitality and to challenge the presupposed relationships between visitors and the institution, members and passers-by, artists and mediators. Realized in a variety of materials and techniques, the works in the exhibition created different moods for the visitors, they commented on the rapport between viewing and being on view, and most of all they invited one to be part of their “here and now” quality, to use their physical presence as a way to underline for oneself the certainty of the moment.

Curator: Raluca Voinea, born in 1978, lives and works in Campina and Bucharest. Art critic and curator. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London (2006), and a BA in Art History and Theory from the Arts University in Bucharest (2001). Since 2006 she is co-founder and president of E-cart.ro Association, a non-profit small institution activating in the field of contemporary art in Romania. E-cart.ro is organizing since 2009 a “Department for Art in Public Space ”, an initiative continuing the pilot-project “Public Art Bucharest 2007 ”, which was curated by Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch, and coordinated by Raluca Voinea. In 2008, Raluca Voinea worked as curatorial assistant for the 5th berlin biennial. Since 2008 she is also working as an editor for IDEA. Arts + Society magazine. She co-edited the electronic magazine e-cart between 2003-2007 and worked as an education curator at the National Museum of Art in Bucharest between 2002-2004. www.e-cart.ro, www.spatiul-public.ro, www.ideamagazine.ro