The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the 19th Iteration of Garage Exchange Vienna — Los Angeles. Vienna-based artists Hanakam & Schuller and Los Angeles architects Current Interests to develop a mise en scène for the Mackey Apartment’s Garage Top Gallery.
The underlying narrative of the exhibition is a satirical text by Victor Gruen from 1975. In this text, a cosmic commissioner meets various characters such as architects, urban planners and environmentalists on terra (earth). Reflecting on this text and its retro future imaginary, the gallery space gets re-rendered as an interior landscape of strangely specific surfaces, iridescent volumina, and muffled sounds.
About Garage Exchange
Garage Exchange seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, The Austrian Federal Chancellery, and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
The planet is populated by billions of animal and plant life forms. Everything is very imaginatively and spiritually conceived and full of diversity in size, structure and color.
The actual object of my search, that living being which is called Homo sapiens, I did not get to see at the first moment. I will probably have to descend a little deeper to discover the alleged culprits.
– Translated excerpt from Victor Gruen, Ist Fortschritt ein Verbrechen?, 1975
Artists
HANAKAM & SCHULLER
Hanakam & Schuller, an artist duo that lives in Vienna, redesigns the rules of the fine arts for their own purposes and creates unconventional arrangements and new world designs in videos and objects. Recent solo shows include Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (A, 2019) and Muzej—Museo Lapidarium Novigrad (HR, 2019). Their video—animation The Borgia Device (Second Day) is part of the show ANTHROPOCENE ON HOLD — 20 artists address the impact of a global pandemic on arts ecosystems and earth’s resilience and sustainability — by PCAI Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative in Piraeus, Greece, curated by Kika Kyriakakou, accompanied by a catalogue with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nadim Samman, Selina Nwulu (2020–21).
CURRENT INTERESTS
Current Interests is a Los Angeles based architectural design studio founded by Matthew Au and Mira Henry. Over the last decade, they have designed and constructed a wide range of complex building programs, including residential, commercial, exhibition design, and public cultural projects. Together they seek meaningful relationships with clients, and work towards aesthetically nuanced projects of all scales.
This exhibition series is made possible by The Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, Civic Service and Sport, Republic of Austria (BMKOES).
