Austrian Cultural Forum New York: Exhibition

NEW EXHIBITION AT AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM NEW YORK TO
PRESENT

UNDER PAIN OF DEATH
In association with the Center for the Study of Human Rights | Columbia University

Opening Events: Monday | January 21 | 5pm - 10pm
Lecture and Discussion | Manfred Nowak UN Special Rapporteur on Torture | 5pm (reservations are required for this event)
Opening Reception | 6pm - 8pm
Official Opening by the President of the Austrian Parliament Dr. Barbara Prammer | 7pm
Performance by Steven Cohen | 7:45pm
Film Screening | Matthew Barney | Cremaster 2 | 1999| 8pm

Exhibition dates: January 22 - May 10 | 2008
Gallery hours: Monday - Saturday | 10 am - 6 pm

New York, NY ... On January 21, 2008 the Austrian Cultural Forum will open the exhibition UNDER PAIN OF DEATH.

With Under Pain of Death, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents an exhibition exploring the global meaning of capital punishment as it is reflected, explored, and critiqued by contemporary art. In a building whose design according to its architect, Raimund Abraham, was inspired by the guillotine, roughly twenty artists are brought together from around the world, all of international stature and almost all practicing today.

The range of approaches these artists take to the topic is wide, expanding not only our conception of what the issue involves, but also our idea of what sorts of art are relevant to such a politically loaded subject.
In a large-scale tableau vivant of life-sized figures, Mathilde ter Heijne draws equally on biography and mythology in probing the individual and social impulses that continue to underpin this archaic practice today. Barnaby Furnas' sensationalistic painting of the execution of American abolitionist John Brown, who is said to have ended his life with a two-hour speech, shares ter Heijne's grand scope and her investment in mythology - albeit the mythology of the wholly modern era; while Mary Ellen Carroll's sculpture rhymes with its biographical dimension.
Here, in an act of deadpan "gallows humor" typical of the artist, self-portraiture is translated into the terms of the death penalty, as the artist depicts herself as a bag of sand whose weight is equal to hers, an object whose purpose is to test the strength of a noose.

Photographs by Lucinda Devlin and video work by Harun Farocki, on the other hand, take on the documentary language, which they use to lay bare the structures of power and imprisonment that surround the death penalty. Farocki's work takes images produced by the prisons themselves through surveillance footage, training films, etc., and uses them to expose us to the systematic, unblinking violence of which disinterested authority is capable. For him, "the penal institution becomes an anthropological laboratory in which life and death are rehearsed in front of the camera's unblinking eye."
At first glance, Devlin's work is aesthetic. She invokes unusually charged mental and emotional dynamics by very consciously separating topic, content, and form from each other. She takes her camera into the sterile chambers in which capital punishment is enforced, letting their architecture speak, directly and with formal perfection.
One of Devlin's photographs is of an electric chair; it's the same one of which Andy Warhol found a photograph for his iconic screen prints, and, via Warhol, it serves as the model for one of Manfred Erjautz's life sized, vibrantly colored lego sculpture. The repetition of this image in the hands of these artists distills its original power from its over-familiarity, returning to the image its stark affect.

When the death penalty is under scrutiny by an artwork, the poetic gesture can resonate as profoundly as any critical one, as evinced in works by Adam McEwen, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Werner Reiterer. McEwen's found photograph of the bodies of Mussolini and his girlfriend, strung up and on gruesome public display, is simply inverted by the artist. By this one is made to feel the macabre, uncanny sense that the couple are dancing, or waving their arms. Like McEwen, Gonzales-Day expands found imagery to life size in his work, in this case taking photographs of lynchings from the American South as his source. Again, a simple gesture destabilizes the image and distills its violence afresh; the artist's only intervention is to remove the hanging victim from the image, producing an eerie vacuum at precisely the location where a nation's culpability and the viewer's guiltily desirous gaze overlap. Reiterer's more humorous touch is just as simple, and its results are no less profound.

The arrangement of these and the many other works in Under Pain of Death is conceived as a series of living interactions with capital punishment, rather than as an inert representation of the subject. To look at each of these works is to descend from the high-minded, disassociating, liberal gaze of the immune individual, and to participate in roles which are fraught with uncertainty.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Artists

Raimund Abraham (Long Drop, 2007)
Matthew Barney (Cremaster 2, 1999)
Bigert & Bergström (Last Supper)
Mary Ellen Carroll (Hope you are all happy, 1991 | Not able to find a suitable vein, 1991 | When drunk, he's crazy | Sandbag, Rehearsal for a hanging)
Chieh-jen Chen (Lingchi - Echoes of a Historical Photograph | 2002)
Steven Cohen (Dead Man Dancing Nr. 12, 2007 | Skullettoes, 2006-2007)
Lucinda Devlin (Omega Suites | 1991-1998)
Manfred Erjautz (Elektrischer Stuhl | 1992)
Harun Farocki (Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen |n 2000)
Barnaby Furnas (Execution of John Brown | 2005)
Ken Gonzales-Day (The Wonder Gaze | 2006)
Michael Haneke (Funny Games | 2007)
Mathilde ter Heijne (Menschen Opfern, Soundinstallation 2002 | Suicide Bomb, 2000)
Jonathan Horowitz (Fund Raising Cube | Amnesty International)
Glenn Ligon (Condition Report, 2000 | Double Silver Self-Portrait, 2006)
Thomas Locher (UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS; Article/Article 10, 2005/2006 | UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS; Article / Article 6, 2005/2006)
Adam McEwen (Untitled - A-Line | 2002)
Errol Morris (Mr. Death - The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter)
Werner Reiterer (I DIED YESTERDAY! BUT I TOOK A WALKIETALKIE WITH ME! | 2006)
Constanze Ruhm (Hut | 2001)
Andreas Serrano (Klansmen - Knight Hawk of Georgia of The Invisible Empire III | 1990)
Taryn Simon (Innocene-Project | 2002)
Andy Warhol (Electric Chair | 1971)
Artur Zmijewski (The Game of Tag / Fangen, 1999)

Curated by Gerald Matt and Abraham Orden
Curatorial Consultant: Ilse Lafer
Commissioned and Produced by Andreas Stadler
Exhibition Coordination ACF: Elisabeth Haider
Exhibition Assistance ACF: Natascha Boojar, Marianne Dobner, Henry Grimm, Sigrid Polster, Marie-Theres Posawetz, Maria Simma

Austrian Cultural Forum NYC