The Kunstverein Medienturm presents Hauntings. Secret and Uncanny Presence in Media, Art and Pop an exhibition on view 25.09–17.12.2011.

For as long as there have been media, people have also believed that these media maintain a special connection to the beyond. Writing, photography, the sound recording, the filmic image — each one of them is the placeholder for an absent presence, a past-elsewhere whose aftereffects linger in the here and now. Under the current conditions of open and electronically available archives, these symptoms are growing more radical: there is virtually no media artefact in existence today that is not haunted by, or even explicitly invokes, a “spectre” or “ghost” from the past.

Zineb Sedira Haunted House II, 2006, Photograph – 100x80cm, Kamel Mennour Paris

HAUNTINGS an interdisciplinary project – exhibition, series of concerts and an evening of film – examines secret and uncanny presences in media, art and pop. Curated by Thomas Edlinger and Christian Höller

The open, electronic archives of our time radicalise this suspicion even further, as there is hardly a media artefact left that isn’t haunted by a ghost of the past. What are the characteristics of this secret presence or uncanny absence in contemporary art? How is the facticity of the simulacrum, the “presence of a ghost” (Jacques Derrida) manifested? What undead beings haunt an art whose main characteristic is its claim to contemporaneity? What “sinister resonances” (David Toop) are currently at work here? Based on a small cross-section of a wide range of media, visitors can experience all the things that continue to pursue and haunt us in today’s art forms. Long version

with Yto Barrada, BIT Bureau of Inverse Technology, Minerva Cuevas, Leif Elggren, Michael Esposito/Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Harappian Night Recordings, Julian House, Mike Kelley/Scanner, Jakob Kolding, Claudia Larcher, Moon Wiring Club, Baron Mordant, The Otolith Group, Walid Raad, Dr. Konstantin Raudive, Markus Schinwald, Zineb Sedira, Alejandro Vidal, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hans Weigand

The Graz-based art association Kunstverein Medienturm continuously presents exhibitions, screenings and theoretical discussions, which are also edited in publications. In the field where media art and fine art experience cross over moments, material- and context references of “new media” face “old media” in a productive way. This interdisciplinary approach is basis for a preferred development of cross-medial projects, which advance current questions in the field of art production and theoretical reflection.

Kunstverein Medienturm
Josefigasse 1, 8020 Graz
medienturm.at

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