Image: Courtesy of Christian Kosmas Mayer
Join us for and yet you grow, featuring work by Christian Kosmas Mayer and Gala Porras-Kim. In this exhibition, Mayer and Porras-Kim utilize the exhibition space as a site to foster discourse and critique how art institutions exercise forms of care within collecting practices. They work to reposition the role of the artist as life givers, and question the traditional role of the curator as collection caretaker safeguarding inanimate objects. Together, Mayer and Porras-Kim situate the art institution as a site for continued life, transforming the MAK Center into a nursery—birthing, feeding, and parenting artworks with a life of their own.
CHRISTIAN KOSMAS MAYER
Christian Kosmas Mayer (b. 1976, Sigmaringen, Germany) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. His work produces and preserves a constellation of narratives about historical remains and representations that are often on the verge of disappearing, or have already been rendered imperceptible. Mayer’s projects, which are the outcome of extensive artistic research and close collaborations with specialists across various disciplines, transform the minor, forgotten, and obsolescent into material artifacts, discursive objects, multi-media installations, and performances. Linking technology to memory and care, his practice explores the methods by which important issues can be approached in conceptually and aesthetically surprising ways: techniques of reversal, of compressing and stretching time, of looking at things from both ends at once.
He has had solo exhibitions at Vienna’s mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria ; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Austrian Cultural Forum New York, USA; MAK Center, Los Angeles, USA; University Gallery of the Custody, Dresden, Germany; Zamek Culture Center, Poznan, Poland; Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany; Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw, Poland; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Germany; Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, Switzerland and participated in biennales and group exhibitions such as the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; Vienna Biennale 2019, Austria; Biennale Gherdëina 2016, Italy; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Marta Herford, Germany; Leopoldmuseum, Vienna, Austria; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA; ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Secession, Vienna, Austria; and numerous other venues.
GALA PORRAS-KIM
Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed.
Porras-Kim received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL, and upcoming at Leeum Museum of Art and MMCA, Seoul, MCA Denver, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021) and Liverpool Biennial (2023). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), and currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.
This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.
Thurs, October 19, 2023
6:00 – 8:00 pm