“Around the world in 72 pages”: also a way of describing EIKON. With the current issue, once again we have assembled an artistic overview that presents current trends of international photography and media art and combines impressive story lines like an exciting novel.
Young Russian artist JANA ROMANOVA, who was already presented in EIKON issue 76 as part of the Tampere Phototriennale, searches for traces within the expanse of social transformations and inner sensitivities: expectant parents asleep, firemen as private individuals, and ironic self-portraits present an illustrious array of realities that insists on closer inspection. Belgian artist DAVID CLAERBOUT, whose work is currently on view at a solo show at Vienna’s Secession, reflects on time as an aesthetic moment. His “filmed narratives” reflect the simultaneity of past, present, and future. The South African artist MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY explores and illuminates in his impressive photographs prisons and their system, including the prison where Nelson Mandela was held. The oeuvre of HEINZ CIBULKA comes in part from his involvement with the Vienna Actionists. Two large scale exhibitions at Vienna’s WestLicht and at Hermann Nitsch Museum Mistelbach show the comprehensive oeuvre of the visual poet, whose digital collages take up an important place in the history of Austrian photography. In MARIA HAHNENKAMP’s work, at issue is the female body. In the truest sense of the word, she rotates a fragile body in blood-red material on its axis or wraps another in foils covered with text quotations, from which the individual has to free herself metaphorically. Some call him a social pornographer, some call him a humanist. Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl in a conversation with Maria Rennhofer talks about Böse Buben at Vienna’s Festwochen and his reputation for his negative irreverence.
Latin America as the upcoming art continent at the moment is the subject of the exclusive report by Paula Alzugaray, curator of this year’s Loop festival in Barcelona. Our tour of exhibitions continues from Linz to Berlin, Winterthur, Humlebæk, and New York to Boris Mikhailov, Diane Arbus, Andreas Gursky, and many more.