SOFIE THORSEN’s interest in contemporary developments in art and social policy and in their historical foundations is reflected in her analysis of architecture and spatial concepts, in which formal abstraction and reduction serve as catalysts for complex conceptual and real-world references.

At Buchberg Castle, the artist uses the Bogner collection’s archive room, which is usually equipped with models and diverse documentary materials. The archive materials pertaining to the collection were removed, the arrangement of the showcases altered, and the windows, which usually protect the room’s contents from the light, opened. Along with the light from outside, light now also falls in a metaphorical sense on the function and significance of this room within the building as a whole. Leant against the walls and one of the showcases, there are carefully rounded and stacked frame shapes, the scale of which references the respective exhibition space. Consequently, they represent in an abstract form the entire exhibition context, thereby upholding the room’s usual function as a pars pro toto but in an alternate guise. Ancient clay fragments of earthenware from the castle grounds in the showcases, corresponding frottages in the showcase drawers and the rubbing of a stair motif as the subject of a wall picture establish a connection to the castle’s history as a living archive whose fragmentary nature and vague presence are precisely what prove it to be a process without definite contours.

(Text by Rainer Fuchs, in Yesterday, Today, Today, booklet on the exhibition, Kunstraum Buchberg 2018)

First 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]. In 2019 the installation of the Ausstellungsräume 1:3,5 [Exhibition Spaces 1:3.5] is moved to the attic. The work Stufendetail 1:1 [Stair Detail 1:1] remains in the collection and is temporarily exhibited in various rooms of the castle. The medieval broken fragments of the work of the same name are returned to the castle archive after the 2018 exhibtion.

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