Franz Ackermann (D), Marcel Broodthaers (B), Ingo Günther (USA/D), Moshekwa Langa (South Africa),
Carsten & Olaf Nicolai (D), Georg Nussbaumer (A), Valeska Peschke (D), Eva Wohlgemuth (A), Yukinori Yanagi (Japan)

Co-production with the O.K Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz

The ATLAS MAPPING exhibition presents an artists´ view of cartography, the oldest of the pictorial sciences. In their works, the artists subject the world´s maps to aesthetic scrutiny and transformation (see catalogue). Above all they address movements and shifts on the maps of contemporary art.

In 1975 the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers created a miniature atlas the size of a matchbox in which he reduced all countries to the same format, so that Austria was practically the same size as Australia. The artist explicitly recommended his pocket atlas for artists and military personnel alike - a neat example of imaginary geography and at the same time a real-utopian attempt at cultural re-mapping. Today the representation paradigm has been replaced by the concept of cultural mapping. Both the cultural sciences and the works of art themselves are playing an active part in the paradigm shift. The metaphor of cartography today serves as an alternative to the great epic narratives. Every map is a projection in two respects: on the one hand as the projection of a distorted world (although the world is only half represented, i.e. without the noise, smell and the children killed on the roads), and on the other hand as a piece of paper that contains the projections of the draughtsman.

ATLAS MAPPING is based on the assumption that the artist cartographer can be seen as offering an alternative to the work of the conventional geographer, with do-it-yourself mapping off the prescribed tracks (instead of extraneous mapping). Mapping is always self-mapping at the same time. To that extent the exhibition focuses on a form of artistic expression that involves having fun with one´s own questions and research, searches and explorations - and with one´s own body. Franz Ackermann works "on the road" creating his mental maps, i.e. suitcase-size drawings as part of an imaginary logbook of real experiences in time and space. In Bregenz the artist will unite three basic aspects of his work to produce a large-format wall-mounted installation in which his mental maps are combined with a canvas entitled "Evasion" (projection of a visited location) and another entitled "Evasion X" (town plans of locations visited) to create a single mapscape work of art. Ingo Günther seeks to counteract current policies of exclusion directed at increasingly large groups of people with his allegorical "Refugee Republic", in which he offers ways for refugees to achieve inclusion. "You have to see refugees," says the artist, "as a sort of Rolls Royce without wheels." His "Neon Tubes" (Magazin 4) and "World Processor" (Kunsthaus Bregenz) globe installations show how flight and migration dissolve the global village into a network of statistical data and nomadic things.

For the African artist Moshekwa Langa, maps are all the more important in view of the situation in his country South Africa, where - as he says - the old borders have been abolished and new ones drawn on an arbitrary basis. When Langa takes his reels of thread to lay out the mapscapes he calls "the pinnacles of my youth", he is less concerned with extending geographical space and more with creating his auto-geography, i.e. finding himself in geography. The bio-geography of place intersects with the geography of self.

Artist cartographers sacrifice truth to fiction. They perform a "Redistribution of the World", as the brothers Carsten & Olaf Nicolai call one of their main works of the nineties. On the basis of that canvas, two new large-format fragments will be on show in Bregenz, namely an outdoor banner resembling a flag measuring 12 x 4 metres (Magazin 4), and a composition comprised of encoded cartographic signs created specially for the back lighting available from the interior glass facade on the ground floor of the Kunsthaus.

In the course of the exhibition, the mythogenic "Black Continent" created by the Linz composer Georg Nussbaumer will complete a continental drift comprising 1303 events. Nussbaumer produces his acoustic geography as a sound cartographer, taking a bird´s eye view of his piano installation, which symbolises Africa. His ivory piano - mise en vue - opens up acoustic spaces in which it remains an open question whether the territory and the map can be made to correspond.

The Berlin artist Valeska Peschke, who now lives in Los Angeles, will be showing the wooden floor of her Berlin atelier, where she roamed for a month - between food and love, reading and working, the TV and the couch. In Bregenz the artist will be continuing her romantic movement beyond the conventional norms of cartography in a trivialising American style, sending a "Join the American Living Room" appeal from across the Pacific. And visitors will in fact be able to enter her living room on South Orange Drive in L.A. thanks to a compressor that takes just one minute to inflate the vinyl house. In February 1997 the artist Eva Wohlgemuth travelled to Monterey, California, to map her body. A scanner was used to scan her whole body in one pass (body mapping). The result is a data set defining 285,000 polygons as the most detailed possible representation of the surface of a body. Thus Wohlgemuth now exists as a digital data object, as a virtual body map. In her macromedia movie installation "evasys.personal information 1.0" - to be seen in Bregenz at Magazin 4 - the artist takes her audience on a journey of discovery through an animated body.

With a flag installation entitled "CIS Ant Farm", Yukinori Yanagi confronts his audience with the fragility of national identities, with the various national banners gradually but inexorably eradicated by ant populations - the de-mapping of national symbols as an inevitability. The exhibition itself is becoming a clearing house for mapping. In other words, the exhibition is also a map - a kind of meta-map. When the artists´ maps were laid out, the folds were revealed as a connector. Difference is not a criterion for exclusion or inclusion; it can be folded to connect, linked without links, and the viewer is a knight hopping from the one to the other.

Concert

Tuesday, 7 April 1998, 8 p.m., Kunsthaus Bregenz
Georg Nussbaumer
A Black Continent
Decorated piano, 1303 events
Johannes Marian, piano

Exhibition venues

Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl Tizian Platz
A-6900 Bregenz
Tues-Sun 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Thurs 10 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Closed on Mondays

Vorarlberger Kunstverein
Magazin 4
Bergmannstrasse 6
A-6900 Bregenz
Wed-Fri 4 - 7 p.m.
Sat, Sun + holidays 10 a.m. - noon, 2 - 4 p.m.

A full exhibition catalogue is available with contributions by Anette Baldauf, Doris Bachmann-Medick, Paolo Bianchi, Marle-Ange Brayer, Dagmar Fink, Sabine Folie, August Gächter, Michael Glasmeier, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Richard Hoppe-Sailer, Adrianne Wortzel.
Published by Turia & Kant Verlag, Vienna (ISBN 3-85132-162-6)