Category: Exhibitions

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Curated Group Exhibition: “Viennese Videogame Aesthetics” (2015)

In 2015 I curated a group exhibition about videogame aesthetics. Here are links to publications from various news outlets:

“Video games are gradually embraced as contemporary artistic medium, especially known for their interactivity. Uniting a variety of media like music, sound, game and level design, they often feature strong visual aesthetics. While video games are already exhibited in their native interactive form in museums worldwide, their visual aesthetics have only been shown when focussing their production art, or when used as marketing medium. Focussing static still frames of games in the context of gallery exhibitions apparently hasn’t been established.

With Vienna being home to a diverse group of video game studios (from one-person-operations up to a team of hundred people), the HOLLEREI Galerie is pleased to invite you to its upcoming autumn exhibition, “Viennese Video Game Aesthetics” – with exhibitors including Anna Prem, Blood Irony, Broken Rules, Causa Creations, Gold Extra, IMakeGames (Maximilian Csuk), Leafthief (Stefan Srb), Michael Hackl, Mi’pu’mi, Sabine Harrer, Sarah Hiebl, Philipp Seifried, Socialspiel, Josef Who & Broken Rules, Zeppelin Studio.

The show, curated by Christian Bazant-Hegemark, exhibits a selection of still frames from local video game productions, printed in museum quality in small collector’s editions (1 + 3AP). This extends the view on the medium, which usually updates its content 30-60 times per second: detached from its other medial influences, its visual aesthetics are heightened, allowing for specific in-game moments to be viewed statically – as viewers are used from paintings, drawings, etchings or photography.”

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Vow of Silence, Solo Exhibition at Galerie Voss (Düsseldorf)

The works of the Austrian artist Christian Bazant-Hegemark deal with the combination of narrative painting and abstraction.

The paradoxical balance of presence and absence, of formulation and creation and of suggestion and meaning is present in all his works. The artist creates an attractive strife. It is challenging to interpret his work, because the viewer is often confused by the change of surface perception. The interplay between the figurative and the abstract may not be limited to one interpretation. Like the work “Your Thick Elephantine Yet So Delicately penetrable Skin” (2011), depicting a girl on a swing. The swing is fitted with a geometrically patterned background and is therefore connected with a surreal element.

Thus the fragmentary starts a communication with the narrative points and a complex dialogue develops. Nothing will be spoken. The figuration monopoly must not oppose the ideas of abstraction. The picture elements appear in fragmentary moments, which can avoid the provability of possible interpretations because they have nothing to prove. The images remain in an uncertain familiarity that seems to have no place. The composition occurs here as a measuring system, pushing whether neither the appropriateness of narrative nor the indulgence of abstraction in the foreground. What we encounter in the works of Christian Bazant-Hegemark, is the floating posture of the fragmentary: the vacuum of groundlessness.

(Link)