This month ikono presents a choice of films by Hans Schabus, an outstanding artist from Austria, who represented his home country at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Schabus works with spaces and their perception, transforming them to his own liking in a very precise way: He flooded a gallery, transported a bridge from Austria to Germany, and his seemingly pointless film journeys and mind-boggling tunneling works have received praise and attention from all over the world.

Born in Watschig/Kaernten in 1970, Hans Schabus studied under sculptor Bruno Gironcoli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he is still living and working. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe as well as in the USA, Mexiko and Sri Lanka. For his films he often works together with his brother, the filmmaker Robert Schabus.

Hans Schabus on ikonoTV

The films of Hans Schabus selected by ikono cover the artist’s highlights from 2000 until today, representing three of his main artistic aspects:

The artist’s sedulous effort and failure is addressed in Atelier (2010) and Echo (2009). In Atelier Hans Schabus works with his own studio space, which played a role in his earlier works already, restaging the finale of Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch (1969). Echo is observing a man on the run through the mucky wetlands of the Danube. The protagonist keeps falling into the mud, but continues trying to escape from something or someone the viewer never gets to see.

Phantasmagoric journeys through the secret places of everyday life are the themes of Passagier (2000), Western (2002) and Astronaut (2003). For Passagier Schabus built an elaborate railway for a toy train with a camera being led through the hidden spaces behind the walls of the studio. In Western Schabus is rowing a sailing boat through the same dirty Viennese sewer seen in the film classic The Third Man (1949), while in Astronaut he is digging a shaft in the floor of his studio, filling up the room with soil before exploring the dark world he has created with his own hands.

Laßnitz (2012), with 78 minutes the longest of Schabus’ films to be on view on ikono, deals with the aesthetic transformation of a certain object by decontextualizing and displacing it. The original proposal simply read: »The work’s title is the name of the river, which was originally crossed by the railway bridge.«This abandoned bridge is sent on a 1000 miles long journey from Austria to the village Ohne in Germany, where Schabus declared it to be a sculpture from now on.

ikono is proud to highlight the multi-disciplinary projects of Kite & Laslett, a young British artist duo experimenting on the border of installation, sound, performance and video. Kite & Laslett interactively explore the phenomenological perception of architecture and space in large-scale settings, providing the audience with a kinaesthetic experience by incorporating light, acoustic and dynamic elements into their artistic environments.

Throughout the month of April, ikono presents a series of six of the artists’ videos, among them La Cura, a performative intervention with Studio Toogood, held at the National Museum of Science & Technology in Milan in 2012, and two productions originally presented in Berlin: Orbit, 2012, which was part of an evening event at Postbahnhof, and Panoptic, 2012, a mobile installation situated physically outside and acoustically inside the former Women’s prison in Kantstraße.

Sebastian Kite and Will Laslett established their cooperation during their final studies in architecture at Westminster School of Architecture in London, from where they graduated in 2010. Since then they create public installations and participatory events all over Europe, including exhibitions in London, Milan, Berlin or Rennes. Kite & Laslett are currently living and working in London.

The human body, with its cultural, political and sexual inscriptions, is the inspiration and origin of Hayv Kahraman’s artistic work, characterized by a stylistic and thematic hybridity. Wood, rawhide and ornamental patterns, effectively accentuated by translucent oil paint, are the materials used in her artworks that find their cradle within the traditions of the Islamic and European art. Subjects and objects are graceful, but disembodied and fragmented, female figures, narrating the stories of their daily challenges, mainly connected to locate their identity within a society that oscillates between traditions, political threads and fragmented geography.

Kahraman, born in Baghdad/Iraq in 1981, studied at the Accademia di Arte e Design in Florence/Italy and at the University of Umea/Sweden. Her work has been seen internationally in solo and group exhibitions and is part of some of the most important collections world-widely, amongst them Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha/Qatar, The Saatchi Gallery, London/UK, or The Rubell Family Collection, Miami/USA. Kahraman currently lives and works in Oakland/USA.

Steve Sabella, born in Jerusalem in 1975, is a Berlin based artist who uses photography and photographic installation as his principle modes of expression. He is the holder of the Ellen Auerbach Award (2008) granted by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and was one of the commissioned artists for the inauguration of MATHAF – Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha where he presented a critical installation entitled ‘Settlement – Six Israelis & One Palestinian’.

Sabella’s artwork has been collected by the British Museum in London, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Ars Aevi museum in Sarajevo and by leading collectors in the Middle East including Cuadro Fine Art in Dubai, Salsali Private Museum and Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah.

The subject of several TV documentaries and short films, Sabella’s work has been reviewed on an international scale. He was recently invited as a speaker for TEDx Marrakech, where he gave the talk “Dare to Question my Name or Where I come from” and a monograph is currently being prepared in collaboration with the Akademie der Künste, reviewing his life and artistic career from the early 1990s

Each month, ikono features the work of one exceptional artist, broadcasting his or her artwork on television for an international audience.

Acclaimed artist Adeela Suleman is presented as our artist of the month. Born in Karachi, Suleman studied sculpture at the Indus Valley School of Art and completed a Masters degree in international relations at the University of Karachi. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including Gallery Rhotas 2 in Lahore, Canvas Gallery in Karachi, Aicon Gallery in New York and International Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Bologna. The artist currently lives and works in Karachi and teaches at her alma mater. Along with three films on her recent works, ikonoMENASA presents her student’s work – the graduating class of 2010 from the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture: Aisha Kanwal Rajar, Cyra Ali, Nidha Tariq, Sammer Sultan and Tashna Salim.

ikono’s Novemeber Artist of the Month, Elisabetta Di Sopra is an Italian video artist working and living in Venice. After completing her first degree in painting she began her Masters in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Her videos and installations intend to investigate the most sensitive dynamics of the daily dimensions of life, expressing the hidden narratives within everyday life. Behind the clean and minimal style of Elisabetta’s videos, lays a hidden density of thought and a unique approach to research. Most of them are focused on the female body viewed as an embodiment of memory. The theme of motherhood plays a crucial role in Elisabetta’s videos. As a digression from this topic, all of her works speak to ideas of humanity, commenting on the cyclical movement of everything that exists on a scale greater than the individual, continuously renewing itself. The imagery is tied to the repeated sense of being reabsorbed into the cycle of life and death.

For October 2012, the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel will be our featured artist.

With a talent for drawing, he became a student of the architects Friedrich and David Gilly, father and son, with whom he learned to appreciate technical accuracy and from whom he received classical influence. Unable to practice his profession as an architect during Napoleon’s occupation of Prussia, he dedicated himself instead to oil painting, engraving, furniture building and even opera scenery such as “The Magic Flute”. In 1810, Schinkel began work for the Deputation for Architecture of Berlin, of which he became the director only a short time later. One of his first complete projects, the New Guard House, was constructed between 1816 and 1818 and can be interpreted as an aesthetic statement. He also designed buildings in Prussia across an area spanning from the Dutch border to Königsberg. His theoretical work, left behind in numerous sketches, is no less important. Through his extensive body of work, Karl Friedrich Schinkel made a considerable impact on the history of both visual and applied arts.

Each month ikono features a homage to a different artist, regardless of the expressive means chosen by him, and free from geographical and historical limitations. September 2012’s Artist of the Month is Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), pioneer of color photography, whose experiments with trichrome photography in the early years of the 20th century exercised a major influence on the following developments of this media.
In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.
Although not well known yet today, Prokudin-Gorskii’s activity in documenting the Russian empire daily life as well as its figurative and visual culture, appears today as an extraordinary testimony of the pre-revolutionary rural and urban Russia.

Finnbogi Pétursson, born in Reykjavik in 1959, has been exhibiting since 1980 and is one of Iceland’s most prominent artists. He is known for works that fuse sound, light, sculpture, architecture and drawings. Sound, a crucial element, is typically incorporated into spare sculptural installations. Pétursson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennial in 2001 with his monumental sound installation Diabolus. Collections include T-B A21, Vienna; Malmo KunstMuseum, Sweden; Nordiska Akvarell Museum, Sweden; and the National Gallery of Iceland. Permanent installations are at Landsvirkjun, Vatnsfellsvirkjun (an electric power plant) Reykjavik University and the Reykjavík Energy Headquarters.
Finnbogi lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Description of Koutoubia (2012), installation view:

Two sinus waves are used to create circular patterns on the surface of a 15x3m pool build under ground by the Koutoubia mosque, center of Marrakech . Spotlights shows the water reflection from a bit different angle in one image on a opposite end of the space. The ripples travel across the water surface, they disappear for a short time when they reach a soft line in the middle of the piece , then appear bit later mixed with the ripples coming from the opposite direction. To gather they form 3hz drawing on the walls, inside the Koutoubia.

Paintings by Sandro Botticelli featured as the Artist of the Month for January on ikonoTV Germany