Interface Event

Opening

Project curator: Juraj Carny
Project co-ordinator: Katarina Slaninova

Participant artist

Matus Lanyi
Stano Masar
Tamara Moyzes
Vladimir Nikolic
Sara Nuytemans/ Arya Pandjalu
Brendan Powell Smith

Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte as it aims to create the most vital facilities for contemporary art in the city of Vienna on non-profit base, concerned with bringing the current developments of the enlargement of Europe to the fore through generating interconnected routes, the director Gulsen Bal invited Space Gallery to stage an exhibition as this is one part of Open Space’s objectives to create a zone of communicative transfer beyond physical borders.

The conception of the exhibition INTERFACE is based on the presentation of art works which consciously confront themselves with religion. The aim of the exhibition is neither to shock nor draw attention to the religious questions, but trace different approaches to this theme by artists coming from various religious environments – Islam, Jewish and Christian, as well as different local contexts (Asia, Europe, America). The main intention of the exhibition is to search possibilities of understanding among various religions. In the eyes of an ordinary man the mass media manipulation can easily turn every Muslim into an enemy, a terrorist. Similar manipulations can deform our opinions on the Jewish, Christian or other religious identity.

Works, created in the media of video, object and painting, presented at the exhibition INTERFACE raise questions about how artists from different cultures and religions express themselves in art. How does a universal language of contemporary art reflect different religious and philosophical approaches? To what extent does religion even today effect our ability to see and interpret the visual reality? Did contemporary art lose the Church as a patron that for many centuries had commissioned artists to create art works? Do religious topics and motifs, the sacred and transcendent still belong among topical issues of art? The exhibition does not have an ambition to judge nor take an apriori attitude about the theme but on the basis of the presented works it wants to provide a space for a discussion.