19:20 onto a dark oak table, polished with the patina of foreign juices, falls a roasted pig. It seems to have landed directly on a flat shape which, from a certain angle, resembles a map of the world. The grain of the wood stretched from side to side, forming a calm surface for the event about to unfold. When the pig hit the table, fat splattered in every direction, spraying the faces of those seated around. They had been more or less prepared for this moment. The only problem was that there was only one knife for the entire village.
The juicy sound of pork striking the wood travelled through the valley like a hawk tracing the letter P across the sky, followed by hungry stares. No one uttered a sound, and every breath hurt with an empty stomach. Tense faces emerged in the candlelight, and questions dripped down like fat from the table. Who would reach for the knife first? Would they carve it together? Would a queue form? Were they after the harmonious union of the tender centre and the crisp crackling? Or a large portion for a single individual?
After a while, they realized that the answer would have to be left to rest. The knife remained lying untouched in the corner, and everyone dressed the wounds sustained here with pork lard.
So see you tomorrow!
Then, all 4 of them waved, before setting off to their homes.
(they often catch themselves dreaming of aristocracy. That the sediment of inheritance lends their hats an excessive, enviable stability. Every day they try to uncover the bottom of the plate.)
&
This summer, Easter presents a duo exhibition by two Vienna-based artists, Jorinna Girschik and Lisa Maria Wordcel. We sense that the works are permeated by the act of unveiling in every direction. Both artists begin with traditional techniques, whose treatment and subject matter negotiate with reality, truth, and fixed structures. We would like to stay away a bit from the word mockery, but if you feel the timing is right, it is also an option.
Girschik’s wooden inlays destabilize not only the logic of craftsmanship but also the linearity of time, opening a space suspended between rule and expectations. Through recurring motifs of columns and airborne figures, she examines the relationship between enduring and provisional structures, suggesting that permanence is sustained only through an ongoing dialogue with instability.
Wordcel’s drawings feature an animated sleeping bag. This grotesque object agency in fact manipulates our needs as such. The sleeping bags take on feelings of exhaustion and sleep, as well as confusion. At a time when the sleeping bag above all evokes the loss of home – a condition threatening an ever-growing number of people – its very form, seated upon a bed intensifies the tension between shelter and displacement, intimacy and precarity. Wordcel’s work allows the object itself to mediate these conditions, collapsing distinctions between subject and support, body and environment.
Text by Adam Vít & Sofie Tobiášová