Exhibitions: Josh Greene, Tamás Kaszás, Damir Očko, Caroline O’Donnell and Paola Yacoub

Josh Greene »Zuhören« (Listen), »Seeking Approval« and »New York Times, August 6, 2009, Entirely«
Josh Greene shows three of his latest works. »Zuhören« is a literary audio tour, which could be experienced for the first time at this year’s Akademie Summer Festival. Now, the texts by artists and writers uploaded on mp3-players can be listened to again during a walk through the Akademie’s exhibition space. »Seeking Approval« is a collection of project proposals including among others an opera for three horses, chopping down a beautiful tree as a collective experience and inviting Prime Minister Günther Oettinger to dinner. For »New York Times, August 6, 2009, Entirely« Greene has read an entire edition of the New York Times only interrupted by urgent needs. The newspaper will be exhibited.

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Tamás Kaszás »Waldschule – Ich liebe die Natur, denn sie ist kein Mensch.*« (Forest School – I love nature, because she is not a man.*)
It is not the animals who learn in Tamás Kaszás »Waldschule«; they don’t need any lessons. Neither is the »Waldschule« a boy-scout weekend during which teenagers learn to listen in the bosom of nature. The school was rather founded by a small community of people who want to move their lives step by step into wilderness. They believe that true life can only be lived there, and are convinced that this will become even clearer after the »total breakdown« for which the economic and ecological crises are only first indications. When the survivors among the ruins of the cities fight for what is left, the wilderness will only provide shelter for those who understand the poetry of the woods.
(*after Thoreau)

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Damir Očko »The Age of Happiness«
Damir Očko screens the two short films »The Boy with a Magic Horn« and »The Age of Happiness«, and shows drawings and installations illustrating the films’ processes of origin. Changing between abstraction and concrete filmic narration, the films show dreamlike figures in fantastic worlds. While the figures in »The Boy with a Magic Horn« are caught in a state of endless waiting, »The Age of Happiness« creates an atmosphere of constant happiness within spheric harmonies. The exhibition combines the fantastic worlds of both films and constitutes a third within the exhibition space: »The Age of Happiness« originated at Solitude; the protagonists are fellows and staff of the Akademie, the settings are on the castle grounds.

In cooperation with Lothringer13 – Städtische Kunsthalle Munich.

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Caroline O’Donnell »Bloodline«
The architect Caroline O’Donnell presents her project »Bloodline«, an intervention on the castle grounds investigating the evolutionary relationship between the castle in Ludwigsburg and Schloss Solitude as well as with another axis, emerging from the forest around Solitude. The intervention consists of a pavilion, O’Donnell erects on the castle gounds. The self-consuming pavilion will embody a generational mutation within its own lifetime.

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Paola Yacoub »Vanity, Gio Ponti. Paradiso Del Cevedale«
In her slide show »Vanity Gio Ponti, Paradiso Del Cevedale« Paola Yacoub watches the uninhabited and ruinous Hotel Paradiso in Bolzano. In an irregular rhythm, pictures are shown, which present details and the surroundings of the hotel.
The hotel was built in 1935 under the fascist regime of Mussolini. It was Mussolini himself who gave the commission to Gio Ponti, a great architect of modernism. Just as the movement of modernism, the fascist system collapsed. The hotel and its ruin remained.
The history of the hotel assigns a uniqueness to the landscape, whose aesthetics remains picturesque and is parodied in the slide show. The romantization seems to get lost here, as there is neither a focus on the past, nor on the future.
With this work, Paola Yacoub asks for today’s representation of ruins, which for instance the media uses for today’s wars. Finally, the question what a ruin means today and which function it had before still remains open.

Exhibition opening: Thursday, September 24, 2009, 8pm
The exhibitions are on view from Friday, September 25, 2009 to Sunday, November 8, 2009
Hours: Tues-Thurs 10am-noon & 2–5:30pm, Fri 10am-noon & 2-4pm, Sat–Sun noon–5:30pm