29.3. – 21.5.2023
In a new programme series, the OK-Centrum Linz opens its rooms as a springboard for young art. In future, the ground floor rooms of the OK-Centrum will present promising young artists who are on the verge of an international career. Hannah and Lea Neckel will be the first.
Maria Venzl, the curator of the new series, sees this as an important task of museums: “Particularly at the beginning of their careers, the presentation in an established museum can give an enormous boost to the careers of young artists,” is Venzel convinced. “Hannah and Lea Neckel have already shown in their previous works that they can effortlessly overcome the boundaries between the real and digital worlds with their artistic works, with a lot of verve and wit. For us as a museum and for me as a curator, it is also about integrating the positions and perspectives of young artists into our own perspectives on art. So it’s also a mutual enrichment.”
The exhibition Beyond the Waterfall. Lost in the Stream of Consciousnesss reimagines the future and bids farewell to the conventional notion of two genders. The boundaries between the real and the virtual world are increasingly blurring for the transmedia artists. Their natural habitat has long been in both worlds at the same time. For the young artists, the internet represents a safe space – for the queer community, for example – that is transferred into the exhibition space as an extended virtual reality. Their view of the internet turns the current debate about the net as a space of social incitement and denunciation on its head. Their internet is not a place of social dangers but a space of safe havens.
A digital waterfall dominates the two exhibition spaces. While in the real world one can find a place of refuge behind waterfalls that cut us off from the outside world but at the same time do not, in Hannah and Lea Neckel’s installation one has to dive behind the fluid curtain of the real into the digital world, which is inspired by an ostentatiously rhythmic word waterfall poem by the two artists.
The exhibition focuses on fluidity, the dissolving and blurring of boundaries between genders and realities. Hanna and Lea Neckel install a virtual waterfall in the space that symbolises a free world without borders and connects what the artists see as the constructed binarity of gender.
Lost in the Stream of Consciousnesss blurs the boundaries between man-machine, gender binaries, self-other and virtual-real and breaks away from patriarchal restrictions. The spaces of the OC become an augmented virtual reality, immersed in the aesthetics of digital subculture.
“beyond the waterfall – we’ll connect our conciousness – through the storm of minds – the heart of desire – wraps around me”, write Hannah and Lea Neckel in a poem that they base their exhibition project on.
In the world of the two young artists, everything flows into each other and intertwines with everything else. Like a punch doughnut that exhibition curator Maria Venzl has promised for the vernissage.
Hanna & Lea Neckel – beyond the waterfall. lost in the stream of consciousness
OK Linz
29.3. – 21.5.2023
OK Platz 1, 4020 Linz
https://www.ooekultur.at
