JOSEF DABERNIG’s objects, drawings, photographs, public art projects and films stand out for their conceptual rigour and sparingly used media. A love of order, rationalistic obsession and a penchant for plannable structures are, as a rule, constant factors of his work. And yet the systems, lists and orders he presents regularly unravel as a result of all manner of inconsistencies. In his latest film Gertrud & Tiederich, which DABERNIG shot at Buchberg Castle, precise tendencies and analytical components encounter spatial circumstances that appear to twist rationality into its opposite. The result is a scenario that the artist outlines as follows: ‘Iron door, bell rope, vaulted arches, traces of a masonry analysis, altarpiece and the austere furniture of a castle chamber used as a sacristy. Between them the filmmaker himself, who says the rosary of the in-house art collection, as it were, by reading out a list of titles and work descriptions to brittle sounds of the organ. The space and the scene counteract the conventions of the art business and simultaneously invest the signifier of this anti-museum with a peculiar meaning.

(Text by Matthias Michalka, in Yesterday, Today, Today, booklet on the exhibition, Kunstraum Buchberg 2018)

Installed in the context of the exhibition Yesterday, Today, Today, curated in cooperation with the mumok − Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Buchberger Sommer 2018 [Buchberg Summer 2018]

www.dabernig.net