OPENING: September 22, 2021, 6 – 10 PM
DURATION: September 23 - 26, 2021, 1 – 7 PM
WITH WORKS BY:
Adam Baran
Siggi Hofer
Mario Kiesenhofer
Zara Pfeifer
HOSTED & CURATED BY:
Mario Kiesenhofer
As part of FOTO WIEN Selected
Supported by the 5th Viennese Municipal District.
Focusing on queer spaces and faraway places, the exhibition explores the visual politics of security and surveillance versus intimacy, negotiating these conditions at the intersection of photography, film and sculpture.
New York-based CIRCUS OF BOOKS producer Adam Baran's new award-winning short documentary TRADE CENTER shines a spotlight on the former World Trade Center's hidden history as a gay-cruising area for men seeking sex with men. Using the voices of five gay men who cruised for sex at the World Trade Center in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the film deftly explores the legacy of those spaces against the sanitized, rebuilt Freedom Tower in Manhattan.
The enthusiasm for lived utopias is also reflected in Zara Pfeifer's series GOOD STREET, in which the photographer accompanies truck drivers on their routes through Europe and portrays their work and living spaces. The intimate and at the same time formal impressions of this male domain are juxtaposed with a view on an aircraft turbine floating in the air. In combination with Baran's film, this powerful motif evokes very contradictory associations, such as terror and freedom.
The deep interest of Pfeifer in spatial and social phenomena is also shared by Siggi Hofer in his work made of wood, which literally bears the name of a gay cruising club called BUNKER and at the same time dissects the construction of this hypermasculine, military vocabulary. The work leans on the spatial coordinates of the exhibition space and enters into direct dialogue with an identically named photographic work by the host.
Mario Kiesenhofer shows filtered insights into the London gay-sex-club THE BUNKER, which served as a protective bunker during World War II and is now a safe space for the fetish scene. With the dark motifs of the INDOOR series, Kiesenhofer refers to the disappearance of queer clubs and communities from the cityscape of international metropolises and, with this exhibition, creates a space for queer discourse in a municipal building in Vienna's fifth district.
SAFE SPACES
REMOTE PLACES
Opening: April 4, 2019, 6 – 10 PM
Duration: April 6. & 7, 2019, 1 – 6 PM
as part of FOTO WIEN 2019
MARIO KIESENHOFER
SHIFTING QUEER TOPOGRAPHIES
TOP19BTM19
Mario Kiesenhofer occasionally transforms his studio into an exhibition space. TOP19BTM19, the name of the temporary location in a Viennese municipal building in the 5th district, is a hybrid space with a focus on queer discourse.