Statement by Ursula Gaisbauer
Urbane Transformationsprozesse

When Ursula Gaisbauer’s artistic practice deals with transformation processes in cities and their architectural fabric, she approaches this abstract complex with the help of concrete projects. This site-specific practice can take various forms. In one case, it is the built substance, that is, old buildings that are demolished or renovated, and the building itself represents the substrate of her approach. In another, the artist interacts with people living in housing estates, for example, and contributes to community building through artistic interventions. If in the first example questions of identity, staging, sustainability, work processes and social fabric are posed, in the second community processes and neighborhood activities are in the foreground.
Gaisbauer is currently pursuing a project entitled Art in Conversion. The programmatic title circumscribes the exploration of a place by means of workshops and talks. How can the emergence and becoming of a place - what came before and what will come after - create an awareness of how we deal with the architectural substance of cities? And what role can art play in this complex process of change?
For all the differences in Gaisbauer’s works, what stands out is what they have in common: the temporary access, the transitory, and the non-effectual acting in the in-between. The use of recycled materials promotes mindfulness and social sustainability. Since all architecture, according to architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi¹, implies action and event, it also implies violence - transformation per se is a form of it. Thinking about this formula is also worthwhile in the context of Ursula Gaisbauer’s works, which bring this aspect of architecture to consciousness in a tangible way. (Text by Patricia Grzonka)

1 Bernard Tschumi: Violence of Architecture, in: Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press: Cambridge/ London, 1994 (1981), S. 121 ff.

Full text available at: http://www.ursulagaisbauer.com/index.php/text

Ursula Gaisbauer currently lives and works in Munich and Vienna. She studied site-specific art and landscape design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. After her studies she assisted the artist Adrien Tirtiaux in Belgium and did an artist residency in Sao Paulo in Brazil in 2018. Since then, she forms the MINING collective together with Friedrich Engl.
At Studio Vulkan for Landscape Architecture, she gained professional experience in an architectural context from 2018-21. In 2021 she then founded the format Kunst im Umbau and works as an independent artist.

http://www.ursulagaisbauer.com/
https://kunstimumbau.com/
https://www.vfmk.org/books/mining

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