Wild Spoerri Rosenstein takes place in the rooms of Hotel Brillantengrund in Vienna and is an exhibition of works by students featuring Elisabeth Wild, Daniel Spoerri, and Erna Rosenstein as part of the open class led by Adam Szymczyk as guest lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the title Principle of Equality. The title was borrowed from the eponymous seminar run by Anka Ptaszkowska at the École des Beaux-Arts in Caen, France between 1983 and 2003. The class was inaugurated in March 2019 with a lecture by Anka Ptaszkowska.

Please register for guided tours for the exhibition for the vernissage via something@brillantengrund.com. Guided tours for the vernissage will take place on 19 November 2019 from 6 p.m.-10 p.m. Please also register for guided tours during the exhibition, which runs from 20 – 25 November, from 12 a.m. to 7 p.m. Guided tours for registered visitors only every hour.

Wild Spoerri Rosenstein

Curator: Adam Szymczyk

Participants: Gleb Amankulov, Bob Schatzi Hausmann, Raúl Itamar, Nestor Janković, Robert Jolly, Julia Karpova, Yul Koh, Anthia Loizou, Dean Maassen, Paul Makowsky, Swarnaly Mitra Rini, Lorena Moreno Vera, Kamryn Pariso, Laura Pirgie, Ursula Pokorny, Michael Reindel, Camila Rhodi, Hanna Schibel, Firas Shehadeh, Jiří Tomíček

To proclaim the “principle of equality” within an esteemed educational institution is to open up a space for uninhibited individual and collective practice. As the class has been progressing, attention was given to listening and being listened to, those two states that form reciprocity, as seen in the dual figures of speaker/receiver (as per artist Moyra Davey), writer/reader, artist/viewer. At some point in the process, these distinctions and their attendant hierarchies must give way to new relationships between equals.

Works of art are the fruition of individual lives. Objects and narrations produced by artists tell individual histories. Moments of correspondence can be grasped in the biographies and works of the three artists whose practice sets the tone and opens up an array of possible themes for the exhibition, without necessarily predetermining its varied outcome.

The exhibition takes place in the rooms of a typical nineteenth-century Viennese residential building in the Neubau district. In 1938, some of the building’s Jewish tenants left Vienna, fearing repressions, and then lost their lives in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Today, several apartments in the building are used by guests of the hotel next door. Making a work of art gives a form to the longing for a place and permanence that can never be reached. Other worlds emerge that are remembrances of those once known and inhabited.

“Wild Spoerri Rosenstein” is part of the project „Principle of Equality“ at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in cooperation with Kontakt Collection, ERSTE Foundation and Hotel am Brillantengrund in the context of VIENNA ARTWEEK 2019.

Cover picture: Firas Shehadeh, Elisabeth Wild in her antique shop in Basel. Archival photograph (1970s) seen at Elisabeth Wild’s house in Panajachel, Guatemala, 2019