Opening: Sept 20, 2024, 6:00–9:00 pm
Sept 21–Nov 21, 2024

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark
Burgring 2
8010 Graz
Austria

The artist will be present at the opening.

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to host Mathias Poledna’s first institutional exhibition in more than ten years. Poledna is a major Austrian artist who works primarily in the fields of film, animation and installation.

This year, Mathias Poledna has produced a new 35mm film in Los Angeles – especially for the exhibition curated by Sandro Droschl at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. The new film will be shown in dialogue with other works as an installation spread throughout all rooms of the institution. Poledna responds to the late modernist architecture of the institution, intervening in its spaces to explore modernity – the central theme of his practice – through references to art, fashion, photography and film history at the interface with popular culture. His works show how modernity is constantly being rearticulated across different disciplines. Reflecting on questions of historicity against the backdrop of contemporary developments, he investigates cultural memory and image economies.

Based on an intensive examination of institutional critique of the 1960s and 1970s, Poledna interrogates the history of exhibiting itself. Poledna’s extensive interventions into exhibition spaces highlight the essential elements of exhibiting, hence incorporating not only architecture, but also design and publications of the institution. For this exhibition, Poledna has also changed HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark’s corporate identity. Keeping the graphics entirely in black and white, his highly aesthetic and reduced formal language is reminiscent of pictorial landscapes in films by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Akin to his exhibition at the Austrian pavillion in Venice (2013), the different works establish a conscious intervention into the institution’s spaces, while the new film opens up references both to his work to date and beyond.