21.07.–25.09.2011
Exhibition at Café Cult #50

Barbara Musil
Next to Nothing

As part of the exhibition series in CaféCult #50, Barbara Musil was showing the wall collage Next to Nothing on CaféCult’s white front wall.

Barbara Musil is mainly known for her video pieces and work in public space; at that time the site-specific piece Realty Check could be seen at the Salzburg district court. For the installation in CaféCult she incorporated the existing spatial conditions and made the space or the white wall part of her work. She cut out rock formations from photos taken during hikes and affixed them directly to the white wall.

Next to Nothing attempted to create a sweeping area, a vast setting without clear boundaries, indoors. The white wall space of CaféCult was not only used to bear images for the collage, rather it made up a large part of the image content. Only through the generous space in between do the affixed details become that which we can recognize them to be in the big picture. The foci and points of concentration in the image was not the leading roles in the piece, but rather the endless expanse of alpine whiteness in between.

The piece was a reproduction of a wall collage produced in 2009 for a white gallery space. The work, originally done as a stereogram that also included the visitors, is largely limited to one surface here. An attempt to use the valuable emptiness of the front wall in CaféCult, to emphasize it and fill it as little as possible, honoring it as open space.
(Barbara Musil)

Barbara Musil, born in 1972 in Salzburg, lives and works in Vienna. Barbara Musil studied Human Medicine in Graz and Experimental Design at the University of Art and Design in Linz.
She recently showed her work in the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, in the Neuen Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin in 2011, and in the solo show Here You Are in 2009 in Salzburg’s Eboran Gallery. Her site-specific work, Realty Check, has been on display at the Salzburg district court since 2010, and in 2012 her work will be shown in the exhibition Von hier bis dort at the Austrian Cultural Forum London.