magazin1_8 - kwi-version

Biography / Version 1

Bernhard Gál
Bernhard Gál (a.k.a. gal) is a composer, artist and musicologist from Vienna, who creates electro-acoustic music as well as compositions for acoustic instruments. In his intermedia and sound art installations Gal combines sound, light, objects, video projections and spatial concepts. Gál’s work has been presented in concerts, sound installations and exhibitions throughout Europe, and in Japan, Taiwan and the Americas. As a musician, he has performed in solo concerts and collaborated with Aki Onda, Alan Licht, Brian Labycz, Chao-Ming Tung, Kai Fagaschinski, Manuel Mota, et al. He has worked together with architects, choreographers, dancers, musicians, painters, performance-, media- and video artists, e.g. G.S. Sedlak, Mandy Morrison, Christian Aichinger, P. Michael Schultes, Akemi Takeya and Emre Tuncer. In 1997 Gál began a continuous collaboration with the Japanese architect and installation artist Yumi Kori (“audio-architectural installations”).

Manfred Grübl
Manfred Grübl’s work represents a comprehensive concept of art. His multifaceted work comprises installation, performance, photography, video, sculpture and an expansion of all these mediums. Grübl makes interventions in public space: he penetrates these with his art to thereby create the potentials for being creative in everyday life. He turns the recipients of his work into the performers of his art, which aims at reactions. The viewer, the state, society are all challenged into taking up a stance. For him art is a subjective, all-encompassing experience. Interaction and communication characterize his work – not static objects in space. Exhibitions: personal installation / Saatchi Gallery / Lincoln Center / Neue Nationalgalerie / Secession, the invisible touch / Kunstraum Innsbruck, ausgeträumt / Secession, Why Pictures Now / Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig. Founder of the magazine VERSION and the Edition KW.I.

Elfriede Jelinek
Born 1946, Mürzzuschlag (A). Austrian novelist and playwright. At age 17 she suffered an emotional breakdown, and during her recovery she turned to writing as a form of self-expression and introspection. A polemical feminist, Jelinek often wrote about gender oppression and female sexuality. She also rejected the conventions of literary tradition in favor of linguistic and thematic experimentation. Among her notable novels are Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1980), The Piano Teacher (1983; filmed 2001), and Lust (1989). She also wrote a number of plays, including Clara S. (1984) and Bambiland (2003). In 2004 Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Jürgen Klauke
Born in Cologne in 1943, Klauke was trained at the Kunstakademie of Cologne. He began to use photography as a means of expression in the 1970s and found inspiration for his first works in the street life of this German city. At that time, before anyone had even mentioned body art, he approached the body as a form of expression and an expressive amplifier. Although his work is primarily photographic, it also includes drawings, gouaches and happenings. Over these thirty years, Jürgen Klauke has maintained an extensive and constant artistic activity that has made him one of the most important representatives of German art. Based on assumptions close to the conceptual art so fashionable during the ‘70s, Klauke has enriched his work with existentialist approaches and a questioning of everyday life, the absurd or sexuality. Jürgen Klauke has not only made history as a pioneer; he has also provided the discourse on identity with a visual and intellectual foundation. He has been a professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne since 1994 and has participated in conferences and art encounters all over Europe. Selection of exhibitions: Heimspiel, Galerie Hans Mayer / Düsseldorf, Absolute Windstille, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Postmoderne – hab mich gerne, Documenta 8 / Kassel, Melancholie der Stühle, Performance 2, Künstlerhaus Bethanien / Berlin, Transformer, Kunstmuseum Luzern.

Linda Klösel
Born 1960 in Memmingen / Germany; 1987 graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; since 1989 she has been coordinating numerous projects and directing the publications department at the Museum moderner Kunst in Vienna; 1999 co-founder of Art, Music & Environment with Gertraud Presenhuber; 2002 scientific scholarship from the City of Vienna for the topic of art on women, feminist art and self-organization of female artists in Vienna in the last 100 years; currently editorial work on the academic journal die bildende for the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Teresa Margolles
Born 1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa (MX), lives and works in Mexico City. In 1990 Teresa Margolles was a founding member of the group SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense/Forensic Medical Service) and has in this capacity since held performances, made installations, objects and videos and intervened in public places. For several years, she has also been working on her own to continue the joint program, taking as her basis the morgue, which in a metropolis like Mexico City is a focal point of social relationships, involving on the one hand poverty, exploitation and criminality and on the other, wealth and modern technology. Themes like violence, death, burial, organ transplants and cosmetic operations are at the heart of her often-shocking consideration of the relics of life. Though the group engages in theatrical actions, Teresa Margolles is loath to stand in the limelight and either asks others to carry out ideas or lets objects speak for themselves.

Ursula Maria Probst
Ursula Maria Probst, art critic for Kunstforum International, Spike, artmagazine, art historian, curator, artist, lecturer at the Art University of Linz. Curator of different Fluc Projects with Martin Wagner and Walter Seidl: Artmapping, Transformer, Fluctuated Images, In der Kubatur des Kabinetts, Urban Signs. Curator of In Passing, The Sound of Your Eyes, Born to be a Star at the K/Haus Vienna. Other projects: Soundbus, Europart, Voyager, Essence, Best of ’08. Member of the art collective Female Obsession.

Peter Riedlsperger
Works dealing with an active mimetic access and handling of information with our surrounding reality textures. By means of media art, video collage, reactive video installation and literal condensation difference and societal intent of these, diverse reality textures shall become apparent. Additionally reactive respectively interactive “social sculptures” and interventions are important aesthetically and as regards content expression of artwork. Former works were dealing primarily with the scopes of autonomous robotic and telerobotic in the range of art. For the professional dilettantism and against the dilettante professionalism. Exhibitions (selected): Arthouse Tacheles Berlin, 1999-2008 (DE); Museum of Contemporary Art Palermo, 2002 Sicily (IT); Museumsquartier Wien, 2004-2006 (AT); Academy of the Fine Arts, Minsk 2008 (BY)

Artur Zmijewski
Born in Warsaw (PL) 1966, lives in Warsaw. The situations provoked by Zmijewski in his semi-documentary films and photographs often confront participants and viewer with the body as the insurmountable basis for human existence in a radical and direct way. “Being different” and the social suppression of this experience represent important elements. Exhibitions: Van Abbemuesum, Einhoven, 2007 (NL); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2006 (UK); Kunsthalle Basel, 2005 (CH).