Wie ich neue Personen in Linz kennen lernen kann

Opening: June 6, 2024; exhibition until June 14, 2024 Gallery WHA gallery Domgasse 1, 4020 Linz

Project within the framework of the course "Artist's Book" by Svetlana Shuvaeva, Experimental Design.

Like many elements of the works presented in the exhibition, the phrase ‘Wie ich neue Personen in Linz kennen lernen kann’ is a found phrase. It does not shed light on the understanding of the exhibited works, however, it sets an important vector for the upcoming meetings. The meetings of people who are somehow interested in books. Most of the exhibition participants formed around the experimental course ‘Artist’s Book’ within the Experimentelle. Some participants and their works we came across spontaneously during the process of preparation of the exhibition. Obviously, the book format attracts many people, so one of the aims of the exhibition is to form a community of artists' book lovers in Linz and beyond.

Besides meeting people, inside the exhibited book-objects we are encountering the meetings of their authors with various aspects of their lives. We meet an old embroidered great-grandmother’s napkin, taken along while moving to another country. The napkin turns into a portal to the story of its creator whom the author never had the chance to know. While having almost no information the author tries to create this image for himself using graphic means. We meet the author’s favorite book, which came to hand in a bright moment of rage. This meeting ends with its destruction and subsequent reconstruction, but in the form of a different poetic entity, expressed in the dynamics of healing stitches. We encounter the passing of the summer holidays, when the days slowly knit together, folding into various patterns, like cooling shadows in the alleys. We face daily travels inside the confined space of our home during the quarantine. We come across the city and its advertising posters, whose graphics take on new life in the book, freed from their commercial responsibilities. We bump into the understanding that you can love books but for some reason never read them. We meet our own body which is bleeding. There are many different meetings the echoes of which live inside our past and future books.

Participating students
Marlene Gläß, Nadezhda Ivanova, Jennifer Kopatz, Michaela Všetečková, Jovana Ćubović, Christoph Biesenberger, Johanna Kubassa, Veronika Lesniak, Elias Neururer, Karoline Pöhn, Elisa Schmaderer, Luzia Stempfer, Laura Wegscheider