Try to freeze this image in your mind: two men standing in a landscape. Now sink below the ground. See the sediments of the past. Add layers of culture and all the different interpretations of history and believes. This image is the starting point for the series of exhibitions “Two Men Standing”.
Two people, thus two images collide – an empty-handed man that walks through the landscape, looking for a place to settle. Then a man of plenty, trying to exclude the other from the land that he claims belongs to him. Law of nature and law of man superimposed.
The exhibition looks for the invisible that suddenly, temporarily surfaces, allowing us to observe where we come from and which commons we have. It looks at traces of radical redefinitions of culture being preserved within the landscape or being attributed to it.
"Two Men Standing. Part 2" presents works by Awoiska van der Molen (Amsterdam), Ibro Hasanović (Brussels) and Anna Hofbauer (Vienna). Van der Molen shows a series of black and white collotypes depicting abstracted landscapes. "Drucke”, by Hofbauer consists of stone-prints for which she used three different types of stone, black and white contact prints and a sculpture made out of stripped-off couch modules. In the video "Study For The Applause” Hasanović reenacts an applause from an event that took place in the Élysée Palace in Paris on 14 December 1995 and has been widely recognised as the agreement that ended the bloodshed of Yugoslav wars, particularly the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The exhibition is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum Brussels and Kupferstichkabinett der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.
Image: Ibro Hasanović, "Study For The Applause", 2013 (video still, detail). Courtesy of the artist.
Read more about the exhibition and the artists
Artists: Awoiska van der Molen, Anna Hofbauer, Ibro Hasanović