A solo exhibition by the Bludenz-born artist Rainer Ganahl (b. 1961, lives and works in New York) will parallel the exhibition of Vorarlberg artists from the period between the two World Wars. This will be the first in a series of solo exhibitions of younger Austrian artists, to whom the KUB would like to offer a first larger museum presentation. Cooperation with foreign houses is a long term goal in this project.

Rainer Ganahl originally studied philosophy and worked in the field of language as well as in textual-pictorial visualization. He studies social, economic, political, and cultural phenomena and uses the various methods of communication in the techniques of the new media.

Video-Still Projekt REDA - About the Voralbergian Dialect

I n the exhibition the artist examines political, cultural, social and linguistic phenomena in an increasingly global society, in which information plays a central role.

For many years Ganahl has chosen the learning of foreign languages as an artistic experience. In 1997 he realized his project "Basic Korean" as an example for learning a foreign language and the cultural implications connected to this learning process. In 1998 followed the project "Basic Japanese" as part of a Japanese grant.

When we listen to someone Chinese,
we tend to consider his speech an
inarticulate gargling. Someone who
understands Chinese will recognize
the language heard. So I often can
not recognize the man in the man.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mixed Remarks, 1914

Ganahl sees in languages a complex reality that is closely associated with identity, social, ethnic and geographical origin, thought and memory.

Ganahl as an artist additionally uses reading, speaking and teaching as a theme for his work and is especially interested in the relationship between knowledge and power. He observes and works with media, technologies and instruments that make possible, control and guarantee the production and the imparting of knowlege.

Behind the straightforwardness and simplicity of reading, speaking, learning and teaching in their apparent privacy hide complex relationships that are worth reflecting on. Just because a more or less well shielded inconspicuousness is placed before conflicts when reading and learning, when speaking and teaching, an ideal mixing ratio for old, existing and future constellations of power and force in any form becomes readable and ready for examination here. Privileges, structural inequality and injustice, divisions in domestic and foreign, foreign workers, persons granted or seeking asylum, center and periphery and last but not least rassist, sexual- and class-specific prejudicies are created, grow longer and stronger with the hidden and open aggressiveness in educational machinery where one can read, speak, learn and teach.
(from: Rainer Ganahl,"Reading, Speaking, Learning,Teaching", 1997)

Ganahl displays in this exhibition an installation, photography, videos and work on paper. The exhibition includes a reading seminar (October 12-14, 1998), which will be offered and conducted by the artist himself.

The Reading Seminar: October 12-14, 1998

The exhibition includes a reading seminar, which will be offered and conducted by the artist himself. On three days Ganahl will investigate with the participants the thematic complex between language, learning and their social implications in times of global change. Individual moments of teaching and learning create a "metalevel", which on the other hand is itself a thematic aspect of the exhibition.

The occupation with language in the related field of art is the central topic of the seminar. On the basis of secondary literature positions to language and social action will be fixed, the importance of language varieties in language globalization will be discussed (dialect, soziolect, idiolect). The role of language in economical as well as sociological processes will try to be tackled from all angles by determining a fixed place in the dynamics of the "international language capital".

An extensive catalogue will be published to the exhibition: Rainer Ganahl. Ortssprache. Local language, published by Kunsthaus Bregenz, Edelbert Köb, edited by Herbert Abrell, 160 pages, color illustrations, German/English.