Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery is a mobile display presenting contemporary sculpture, installation and performance. The gallery will show pieces by nine artists on top of a modified luggage rack on the roof of a Japanese compact car between August 13th and December 14th. Shown in different public locations in Vienna, the sculptures directly refer to the areas of the city where they are presented. Daihatsu-Rooftop- Gallery will drive around each area daily for one week.
In their collaborative sculpture created for Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery, the two artists fuse the idea of traditional panel painting with the monolithic form and surface quality of a rock. Organically enclosed within a monumental feigned boulder, Titania Seidl’s paintings seem like ambiguous ex-votos.
They show fragments of bodies that concentrate out of painterly gestures. The Plague Column on Vienna’s Graben offers a particular context for the presentation of Titania Seidl’s and Lukas Thaler’s piece, a baroque corporeality oscillating between lasciviousness and suffering.
Their sculpture emphasizes the contemporary reinterpretation of the Plague Column by the citizens of Vienna: Sparked by the Corona pandemic, the column again became a site for appeals, hopes and for leaving offerings of votive images and objects. The sudden re-actualisation of historical memorials, sites and symbols resulting from profound shifts in societal discourses is another important aspect. Provoked by the pandemic or the current vandalism of monuments related to colonialism motivated by the Black-Lives-Matter movement, the reappearance of public statues in the collective consciousness is a dynamic and fascinating phenomenon that needs to be questioned.
Artists:
Titania Seidl, *1988, lives and works in Vienna. www.titania-seidl.net
Lukas Thaler, *1989 in Hall in Tirol, lives and works in Vienna. www.lukasthaler.com
Concept:
Peter Fritzenwallner, *1983 in Neukirchen am Großvenediger, lives and works in Vienna.