2022, HOW THICK IS THE LAYER OF BUTTER ON YOUR BREAD? NOTES ON CLASS AND CAPITAL, Exhibit Studio, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna / 2022, annual exhibition, Weiße Gasse, HfBK Dresden
video, photography, archive photos, intervention

installation view at Exhibit Studio

The so-called ‚Monobloc‘ chairs have become accessible to almost everyone since the 1970s as a result of low-cost mass production.
Based on collected associations, primarily two contrary ideas collide in the paradoxical aesthetic of these chairs: the idea of home and non-place. The project examines how one associates this chair with certain types of places and how the chair (re-)defines those places according to how they are perceived. By placing and documenting these chairs in different surroundings, the project observes how they are changed by the intervention: a series of staged photographs of Monobloc chairs that are temporarily installed in a diversity of places, which are not given much attention by the society. This is opposed to archival photographs from family albums, in which the image of the chair induces subjective, domestic memories. Likewise, the looped video work captures the strange timelessness and the object’s ubiquity.
Through unobtrusive interventions in the environment and in the exhibition space itself, the „elitist“ art space is confronted with the cheaply mass-produced chair: It reminds us of social equality and permeates the privileged space, raising questions of accessibility and the exhibition space itself.

Text: Isabell Alexandra Meldner