Introduction Mathias Poledna

The theme of modernity, how it is articulated historically and how it reappears in constantly changing forms, is an essential point of reference for Mathias Poledna’s artistic work, playing a central role in his new exhibition at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. He reflects this interest both through his attention to the late modernist architecture of the building by combining his recent film My Favorite Shop (2024), newly produced in this context, as an installation with a tapestry by the Swedish textile artist Märta MååsFjetterström in 1928 and a series of works based on historic photographs, arranging them in dialog with the institution’s rooms. The exhibition is also contextualized by Poledna’s personal and intensive ongoing engagement with institutional critique from the 1960s and 1970s. And as is often the case in his films, the new production gathers a variety of references to art history and phenomena of popular culture.

As in Poledna’s earlier works, such as Actualité (2001), Western Recordings (2003) and Version (2004), which refer to the music industry, or Crystal Palace (2006), for which he filmed in a jungle in Papua New Guinea, Poledna’s study of modernism is subtle. It is possible to argue that Poledna picks up on a specific visuality reflecting a normative level, which, in a way, works as a means of concealment in different source material and consciously uses it as a tool: his preoccupation with image economies reveals darker sides of Western modernity, including its violence and its ruptures without explicitly naming them. Through a careful selection, condensation and reduction of images, which in some cases leading almost to their negation, Poledna creates a visual world with an inherent phenomenological dimension that, in this regard, reaches beyond established ideas. Modernism is not only seen as a historical, self-contained and clearly defined epoch.

At the same time, Poledna scrutinizes certain exhibition policies that emerged with modernism, which the pavilion of the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, built in 1951 /52, embodies particularly well through its architecture, premises and its placement within the urban space of Graz and thus within the central, concrete urban architecture, such as the park. In a similar context, the British ethnologist Sharon MacDonald has referred to a politics of display to point out that institutions and museum exhibitions should never be considered independently from politics and other economic contexts. The divisions of natural history and art history in particular must always be seen in connection with the great narratives of modernism, such as a strive for progress and the emergence of nations, and therefore as constructs that are never politically neutral. This also applies to an understanding of the modern or contemporary as being in opposition to the traditional. Against this backdrop, Poledna deals not only with the historicity and contingencies of modernity itself, but also with that of institutions and museums, whereby he questions a teleological understanding of history. Combining a wide range of media and objects in his research by means of a multimedia practice of citation and archiving, he examines the wide variety of articulations with which modernism manifests itself across different creative disciplines. In this sense, the practice of citation implies an exploration of the past, understanding it as an archive and thus as a basis and possibility for a future that can distinguish itself from the present. Neither history nor memory appear in his work as self-contained or untransformable concepts, but rather as fragmented and characterized by discontinuities. However, it is precisely these characteristics which offer potential for transformation.

In Austria, modernity often has very different connotations than in Great Britain, Italy, the USA or Brazil. In Austria, modernity is more likely to be understood as a left-wing alternative to conservative tendencies that sought to reconstruct the Habsburg Empire. It provides a counter-model to the fascist and authoritarian regimes of the early 20^th century and, after the Second World War, a liberal-progressive agenda against the totalitarian horror of both National Socialism and the Soviet Union. The construction of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark was initiated by the British Allies during their activity here in Graz, and was one of the first cultural buildings to be built after the Second World War. Modernism thus also found its way into the building industry. Given the specific political dimensions that the era has in Austria, it is only understandable that Poledna’s work seems to have focused on the more positive aspects of modernism.

Responding to the spatial characteristics of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Poledna merges various levels of abstraction, including complex relationships between institutional critique and neo-conceptual strategies. The first generation of institutional critique in the late 1960s and 1970s included artists such as Michael Asher, Daniel Buren and Dan Graham, and applied conceptually-influenced methods of art to institutional structures in both immaterial and physical ways. It questioned exhibition practices, the supposed neutrality of architecture and the proximity of institutions to the economy, with a particular focus on site-specific interventions. A so-called second wave of institutional critique in the 1990s was characterized by protagonists such as Tom Burr, Renée Buren and Dan Graham, and was more interested in dominant methods of knowledge production and dissemination in museums – and thus in acts of classification and the implicit roles attributed to artists. Poledna’s work alludes here to a concept inaugurated in the 1990s by Peter Weibel and James Meyer, which describes a large number of exhibitions from 1993 onwards combining approaches of institutional critique with ideology-critical and socially engaged artistic practices. The concept’s primary aim was to establish a continuity of critical questions regarding the institutional production, presentation and distribution mechanisms of the art system in the age of late capitalism, and to therefore encourage a self-reflexive dimension in artistic practice. Since his early works, Poledna has responded to conceptualism, historical moments of conceptual art and institutional critique in a critically reflective way.

In this exhibition, too, a paradigmatic iteration in Poledna’s work seems to manifest itself, namely that the architectural and institutional foundations that guarantee the assumed autonomy of a work of art are consciously emphasized and thus become a de facto exhibition object in their own right, entering into a permanent dialog with the material presented within their frameworks. In this way, Poledna ensures that the phenomenological perception of his film, for example, cannot be isolated from the conditions and context of its presentation.

An example of this confrontation is the lighting direction that Poledna developed for the exhibition; as soon as the film begins, the light switches off automatically, and turns on again when at the end of the film the music fades out. Not only is this setting reminiscent of the dramaturgy of a movie theater, it also brings to mind the situation in a nightclub – when the lights go on, the party is over. It also reflects the fast pace of the art market and related disciplines such as the fashion and music industries. In this sense, Poledna not only considers his own position as an artist and how his practice is connected to other creative industries, such as his collaboration with specialists from various fields to produce elaborate cinematic works, but also on how he himself operates in the fast-moving art world and culture industry. As his highly aesthetic and precise formal language reveals, he sets himself in opposition to the fast pace of mass production by working concisely at intervals usually creating a cinematic work every one to several years.

In addition to the installation, Poledna has also revised the corporate identity of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. Now entirely in black and white, it generates a new perception, not only within the institution itself, but also in the urban space, since the lettering and design of the poster, invitation and all other media, which are in black and white, deviate from the current visual identity of the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark.

In particular, the subject of the newly designed poster shows the fragmentary head of a limestone sculpture from the Middle Ages, to be precise the head of King David, which was built approximately 1145 after Christ. This establishes a direct link to the early art history, to the artifacts and breakages in its history, but also to Poledna’s own history and the new film. It can thus be read as an emblematic sign for his practice and oeuvre itself, which he is presenting here at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz, a city with which he himself has strong autobiographical connections.