Austian Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia, Italy

13th May–26th November 2017
Curated by Christa Steinle

"It is the task of sculpture to produce spatial experiences. Nonetheless, the question arises as to what kind of space this is—because spatial experience has changed. The old spatial experience, and therefore also classical sculpture, were body-centred. The new spatial experience, on the other hand, is centred on machines and media. Erwin Wurm is one of the few artists who translate changing spatial experience into spatial art itself. But Wurm has also already entered the territory of media-centred spatial experience with his One Minute Sculptures: instructions to the public that are photographically documented.  

In front of the pavilion a huge truck stands vertically on its head, i.e. on the driver’s cab, the hood, immobile. Erwin Wurm’s accessible sculpture, a truck that visitors can climb up through the inside and onto its platform, allows them a threefold spatial experience: of body, machine and media. They experience the socio-political and psyscho-political dimension of every spatial experience. Especially today, global migration movements have made the political and psychological dimensions of space more current than ever. Space is now being defined in geopolitical terms again. On the one hand, we once more have borders, fences, and walls.

Restricted space, it turns out, is only restricted for the body. Information space is infinite. And so, our living space also becomes different. We take part in events at which we are not physically present. Also living space is perforated. This is why a caravan riddled with holes stands inside the Austrian pavilion. The caravan is per se the paradoxical cross between a dwelling, i.e. immovable property, and a car, i.e. mobility. The visitors as performers experience both settledness and nomadism, containment and exclusion, mobility and immobility. Since this takes place in a caravan (in German: “Wohnwagen”), this experience clearly also calls on their social and psychological experiences. In the word “Wohnwagen”, “Wohnung” means dwelling and so has connotations of home and homeland, of family, domicile and domestic country. The “-wagen” part of the word, meaning car, implies “on the road,” traveling to foreign people and distant countries, going abroad. Will the performative public in the Austrian pavilion have a cosmopolitan experience between limitation and dislimitation, between roots and future, between departure and arrival, between resettlement and migration?"

Text by Peter Weibel

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