We baptised the first of two project exhibitions Solids in Revolution. It runs at the Neue Galerie Graz between 24 May and 21 September 2025.
Here we bring together the material forms and the notations of shared processes, making it possible to witness the play of proximity and distance among the individuals, and to witness how forms and ideas reappear in unexpected places.
The title is inspired by rotational movement that transforms curves into volumes, turns contours into spatial forms. Taking the geometrical abstraction of ‘solids of revolution’ further, such movement could metaphorically signify the type of undertaking involved in the creation of an exhibition from artistic research – an interregnum between artistic practice and systematic inquiry, in which questions on aesthetics, knowledge and ethics not only depend on each other, but constitute a rhizomatic weave.
We were excited to present the simularr project on 08 May in Porto at the Conference of the Society for Artistic Research – SAR25, under the theme of ‘Resonance’.
It was a great opportunity, as we have now completed all three project intervals, and could therefore draw connections among them. SAR is a lovely conference with a chance to meet and network with a lot of people across all disciplines within artistic research. We travelled with many colleagues and students from our research institution, the GMPU Klagenfurt.
simularr was, from the very beginning, planned to conclude with an exhibition, among other things, that brings together the distinct approaches developed over the project’s time span.
A lot has been said and written about the exposure or exposition of artistic research, and we have constantly employed means to expose our research to the fellow team members, using
digital platforms such as the Research Catalogue or physical spaces in form of ‘meta-expositions’. The idea of meta exposition being that artefacts and notations that had already
be exposed within the group as we were working together would be brought back and united in a space to form of a database that we can than rearrange, interrogate, interrelate.
Beginning the third interval straight with the intensive weeks, meant that we had a relatively long in-situ phase following. Different from the other intervals, it also meant that we developed most materials during the first two weeks which we now brought back to our workspaces as starting points. The main spaces for most of the time were the three studios and the social room at Reagenz. We began with weekly group meetings that lead into a mode of ‘practice sharing’, wherein each of the artists-researchers would ‘host’ a day of activity that emerged from their practices.
The project’s third and last interval followed close to the preceding one, giving us little time for pause. What would be a suitable space for its intensive weeks? Kicking off right at the beginning of September, still in Austria’s summer semester break, we seized this opportunity to plunge straight into the ‘intensive weeks’, as the incoming artist-researcher Andrea Bakketun arrived from Norway. Seeking closer proximity with the Mahler university as the main research institution, we had secured the opportunity to work at the Hoke Werkhaus in Saager, half an hour east of Klagenfurt in Carinthia. Conceived by late artist Giselbert Hoke and carried forth by his family, the Werkhaus consists of a number of workshops and is located on a hill, surrounded by forest and lakes. For a part of the intensive weeks, we had again support for facilitation, this time by anthropologist Caroline Gatt.
