STAGES
Nanna Kaiser
Peak Season

The recurring format of STAGES is as radical as it is simple: young artists from Graz and Styria are offered a stage for the duration of an evening, or occasionally, for longer presentations. HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark serves as a platform for up-and-coming artists from the region to present their work to a wider audience. The focus of the evening is on the artistic approach based of a selected work, which is shown on site and presented in the artist’s own words. The artists themselves decide whether this introduction to their work takes the form of a short lecture, a performance, or some other means of choice. The selection of artists and their works is made in connection to the main exhibition, and serves as an extension of its themes.

Nanna Kaiser’s works represent a disruption; an irritation of existing norms and conventions. Her practice follows in the tradition of Eva Hesse’s skin-like latex sculptures, and Heidi Bucher’s technique of ​“skinning” walls and floors by applying layers of liquid latex and then peeling them. By taking up sculptural elements in her paintings and giving her sculptures painterly qualities, Kaiser’s work blurs the boundaries between object, surface and perception. In her exploration of melancholy, Kaiser reveals the psychological traces and effects of an inflated economy and its one-sided libertarian understanding of capitalism. Based on objects, she thus makes processes of decomposition visible revealing our current, destructive era of the Capitalocene. Her works visualize processes of decomposition in both skin and architecture in response to our current, destructive Capitalocene.

Drawing on feminist strategies, she considers the accumulation of material through practices of collecting, skinning and printing as an active gesture, as a form of appropriation in a male-dominated, patriarchal world. Kaiser works with prints and molds of objects or architectures and transforms them in such a way that only fragments are reminiscent of the original state of the original objects. Her aim is to examine the sometimes very high-quality materials (such as car parts) and thus not only to question the demonstrations of power that are attached to them, but also to uncover them and thus achieve a shift in value on a level of meaning. Subsequently, a process of devaluation takes place in which she provides the objects found on her personal hunt with cheaper, perishable materials such as latex.

With the Peak Season series, which Nanna Kaiser is presenting as part of STAGES, she attempts to capture an interim state in a similar way to her previous works. She starts from specific objects that are not only connoted with attributes such as dominance and power, but also radiate them. In this context too, Kaiser appropriates these objects using archaic and artisanal methods and exposes the material used, which she subjects to an almost political transformation process. This process then turns the material into a very fragile substance. Her works shown here evoke surreal associations not only through their exposed materiality, which, similar to Biljana Đurđević, focus on melancholic aspects of a gloomy environment in an almost fragile way. At the same time, in the sense of a combination of materials that have been taken apart, her objects also have an end-time atmosphere that precisely reflects our times, characterized by populism and climate change.