WORLD SELECTION OF CONTEMPORARY ART

10 Februar – 9 April 2006
Curators: Martin Sturm, Genoveva Rückert

Johanna Billing /SE, Candice Breitz /ZA/DE, Tania Bruguera /CU, Chen Chieh-jen /TW, Donna Conlon /US, José Damasceno /BR, Calin Dan /RU, Muratbek Djoumaliev & Gulnara Kasmalieva /KG, Juan Manuel Echavarría /CO, Quin Ga /CN Diango Hernandez /CU, Markus Huemer /AT/DE, Karl-Heinz Klopf /AT, Isabelle Krieg /CH, Yaron Leshem /IL/US, Maider López /ES, Jakub Moravek /TZ/DE, Oscar Mu?oz /CO, Deimantas Narkevicius /LT, Adrian Paci /AL/IT, Robin Rhode /ZA/DE, Gerwald Rockenschaub / AT/DE, and a new version of "Black Market Worlds" from the Vilnius art triennial (a project formerly known as BMW)

Self-assured, sensuous, playful, witty and continuously interested in the hot topics of society and politics – this is how a young generation of international artists presents itself today. A generation that borrows from contemporary pop, film and design culture with little reverence for great role models, carrying out their work with a high degree of professionalism. Nor is there any longer a "divide" depending on geographical position; on the contrary, a large portion of the interesting works are created at the margins of or outside Europe.

This could summarize an "OK best of" from the renowned biennials of Venice, Istanbul, Prague and Vilnius 2005. "Biennials" are like grains of sand on the shore – yet the most important of them are still trendsetters in art, gauges of the direction art will take. Less commercial than art fairs, they are not only stages for "big names", but also a desirable platform for young, unknown, up and coming artists to present themselves in an international spotlight.

The exhibition "Biennale Cuvee" presents a "world selection" of 38 international artists who exemplify the most interesting developments in the field of contemporary art. For the first time, Linz thus becomes a setting for this kind of up-to-date survey exhibition of art. One aim of the exhibition is to open up a "window to the world" and enrich national and local debates about "contemporary art" through an international comparison.

A selection of this kind from among hundreds of art works is naturally subjective. In keeping with the objectives of the O.K as a laboratory of contemporary art, the focus is on a younger generation of artists, concentrating on current aesthetic modes of expression, explicitly space-related or media works and projects dealing with the issues of society.

The broad-ranging list of participants and the divergent curatorial concepts of these biennials clearly show that there is no homogeneous idea or agreement about what contemporary art is.
Despite the many differences, certain trends, themes and tendencies are evident.

The O.K has selected projects from the biennials for a cuvée commensurate with the center's overall program, newly arranging the works in thematic groups.

1) Film and video installations are the dominant genre. Under the title "Experiments in Media" the O.K has assembled works evincing new, forward-looking perspectives in ways of artistically dealing with "technical media". What is conspicuous here is that digital technologies do not play a dominant role in contemporary media art. More often, methods from pop culture are picked up and creatively utilized (e.g. remix, cut & paste with Robin Rhode and Candice Breitz) and the specific qualities and limitations of the medium are explored through art-historical references or in an interplay with classical fine art genres such as painting and sculpture (e.g. Gerwald Rockenschaub and Markus Huemer). Another trend involves highly professional film productions (e.g. Chen Chie-jen and Johanna Billing) and an ironically playful use of documentary material (e.g. Dona Conlon, Deimantas Narkevi?ius)

2) "Political art" is still booming. Unlike the "drier" documentary style and "sociologist art" of the 1990s, socio-political themes are again being formulated "symbolically", with all the means of contemporary aesthetics, sensually and insistently (e.g. the situation of Afro-Columbians in the video installation by Juan Manuel Echavarría). Numerous works focus on and meticulously analyze very specific social circumstances from the artists' immediate cultural environment – evidence of the major influence of the "cultural sciences", such as Postcolonial Studies for Tania Bruguera. In this context, a number of projects are especially interesting, which deal with coming to terms with communism or post-communist conditions (e.g. Adrian Paci and Django Hernández) or those that deal with mass media.

3) A sub-theme of this area is the city: mapping, background research and documentary inventories of urban phenomena are as much a part of the confrontation with the city as playful and light-hearted works, such as the videos by Donna Conlon. Explorations of architecture and urbanism focus less on sculptural qualities than on the spatial and social dimensions and the transformation of public space. In addition to works developed for a specific location, such as the intervention "Mind the Steps" in Istanbul by Karl-Heinz Klopf, the O.K also shows Calin D?n's poetic engagement with Bucharest, in which a man carries a door through the city in the midst of transformation.

4) The era of the great, charismatic curators influencing the art field with their visionary exhibition themes appears to be over (in this sense, it is quite typical that the Swiss artist Gianni Motti & Christoph Büchel dedicated a separate "street" in the Gardini of the Venice Biennale to the exhibition maker Harald Szeemann, who died last year). Whereas Prague is especially distinguished at first glance by quantity – two biennials (!) at the same time with over 500 art projects, numerous curators and sub-themes – Istanbul was compelling with an overall curatorial concept relating to the city, on the theme of urbanism with commissioned works produced on site. The major curated exhibitions in the Italian Pavilion and the Arsenal in Venice were more personal, thematically more diffuse and focused on the individual work – a trend that was continued in the large national pavilions of the Gardini. The curators of the Baltic Triennial define their role quite differently. "Disguise and Deceive" is not only the theme treated by the show, but also the basic strategy of the project. All the conventions of modern exhibition organization – from marketing to exhibition architecture to the presentation of individual artists – are self-ironically and playfully undermined. Black Market Worlds 'breaks the rules'. For this reason, instead of selecting single art works, the curators developed a new version of the exhibition for the O.K.

Qin Ga
Miniature Long March, 2002 – 2005
23 photographs and 2 videos

The historical "Long March" is the central heroic myth of the Chinese Communist Party. After the communist uprising was crushed by the National Army, Mao withdrew with his group to the Jinggang Mountains. Following further defeats, Mao Zedong founded the independent line of Chinese Communism and marched from Zunyi to Yan'an. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the "Long March" was propagated as a symbol of strength and resistance.
Qin Ga's two-part work depicts a very impressive connection between movement through public space, memory and collective history.
In 2002 a team of artists set out from Ruijin to Yan'an. Qin Ga, who had stayed in Peking, had the journey tattooed bit by bit on his back and photographed. As the second part of the work, the artist followed this journey personally in 2005 and was tattooed during stays from the Luding Bridge to Yan'an.
1st Biennial of the National Gallery Prague, 2005

Qin Ga, born 1971 in Inner Mongolia, lives and works in China.
http://www.longmarchspace.com

Oscar Muoz
Re/trato, 2003
Video

Occurrences and things in motion, which have a beginning, but no clear shape and no end – these are Oscar Mu?oz' themes. In Re/trato it is the futile attempt to fix a portrait on stone with water. An eternal repetition of the same movement that never reaches its goal. Mu?oz emphasizes the frustrating moment in the repetition, which seems like a playful variation of the "Myth of Sisyphus". To be precise, though, it is not always the same thing that is repeated. The face that is brushed on again and again is, according to the artist, continuously "reconstructed from memory" and thus differs from the previous one.
Munoz, who has explored photography both theoretically and artistically again and again, thus indicates the impossibility of unequivocally capturing and fixing the counterpart, the other, the 'world'. "Re/trato" is a play on words with the meanings "portray" and "view again".
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Oscar Munoz, born 1951 in Popayàn, Columbia, lives and works in Kali.

Coexistencia, 2003
Video

Coexistencia shows leaf-cutter ants in a forest in Panama. Donna Conlon placed peace symbols and small flags of the 191 members of the United Nations, which the ants 'attacked' and carried off just like leaves. The entire action lasted about an hour; the documentary video was edited in such a way that only the flags can still be seen from countries that have been involved in military conflicts in recent history.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Donna Conlon, born in Atlanta/USA, lives and works in Ciudas de Panama

Chen Chieh-jen
Factory, 2003
Single-channel video installation

As a cheap wage country, Taiwan was one of the main centers of the textile industry in the 1960s. Beginning in 1990, however, the intensive production industry migrated to countries with even lower production costs, and many Taiwanese became unemployed.
In 2003 Chen Chieh-jen invited a number of textile workers to the previously closed Lien Fu textile factory, where they had worked for over two decades, to shoot a documentary. The abandoned factory presented itself like a "relic" of the past: many objects were still there, such as calendars, newspapers, punch clocks, tools and banners, megaphones and loudspeakers from the workers' protest against the closure. What was missing was replaced, and the workers agreed to take up their work again for the film. The camera concentrates on their body language while working, on simple actions and the atmosphere of the space. Several fragmentary sequences from the time of the protest against the closure of the factory were edited in. In keeping with the women's wish not to speak, the film was shot without sound. Chen Chieh-jen takes a phenomenon of globalization and translates the transformation of the textile industry in Asia into a highly professionally made 35mm film.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Born 1960 in Taipei, Taiwan, lives and works there.

Deimantas Narkevicius
Once in the 20th Century, 2004
DVD PAL, Edition of 5

Narkevi?ius' work centers around the relationship between the individual and history, personal experience and mediation through the media. Although he deals with contemporary themes in his work, the underlying problems reach far back into history. The works were created at a time of dynamic upheaval in the post-communist society, in which there was no time left for historical reflection or for developing future perspectives.

In the work at the O.K Narkevi?ius uses found-footage material from the national Lithuanian TV archive and makes the action run backwards. "Once in the 20th Century" questions the credibility of the images. The film shows a happy crowd in Vilnius apparently witnessing not the overthrow, but the erecting of a statue of Lenin.
Biennial of the National Gallery Prague, 2005

Deimantas Narkevi?ius, born in 1964 in Utena, Lithuania, lives and works in Vilnius

Muratbek Djoumaliev & Gulnara Kasmalieva
Trans Siberian Amazons, 2004
Video installation

This work, shown at the Venice Biennale in the Central Asian Pavilion installed for the first time, deals with the situation of suitcase peddlers in Kyrgyzstan, translating this into an installation with three monitors.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of the market, the population's standard of living rapidly deteriorated, acquiring previously unknown market mechanisms became necessary to survive. The economic shock paralyzed practically the entire local industry and led to a serious trade deficit. This gap was bridged by so-called "suitcase peddlers", who flooded the market with imported goods, a new form of trade that is dominated by women. The incessant migration between producers and consumers forces these suitcase peddlers to cover enormous distances, often crossing several borders and using practically all the possibilities of public transportation.
The Transsiberian Railway between China and Central Asia has developed into a preferred "trade route". In trains throughout Asia one encounters these women carrying plaid Chinese bags full of goods from China.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Muratbek Djoumaliev, born 1965 in Bischkek/ Kyrgyzstan & Gulnara Kasmalieva, born 1960 in Bischkek/ Kyrgyzstan ; live and work there.

Yaron Leshem
K鰕 / Village, 2004
Light Box

"Village" is a 4.7 meter long panorama picture composed of digital color pictures. 50 photos were taken with a medium format camera and mounted on a light box.
The image shows a model of a Palestinian village built by the Israeli army. The model village was built in true-to-life size for training Israeli soldiers, to simulate possible attack scenarios.
The work stages a sharply focused picture in digital collage technique; in the authenticity of the details not even perceptible with the naked eye and the back lighting, it seems aesthetically glorified, thus becoming a hyperreal metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
9th Istanbul Biennale, 2005

Yaron Leshem, born 1972 in Jerusalem, lives and works in New York http://yaronleshem.com/

C錶in Dan
Sample City, 2003
Four-channel video installation

With sampled image and sound sequences referring to one another in a precisely calculated rhythmic alternation on four projection surfaces, C?lin Dan draws a portrait of the city of Bucharest. Dilapidated tower blocks next to estates of terraced houses, Roma families camping with their horses and carts in the wastelands in the midst of the city, broken streets and new shopping paradises – today the formerly communist Bucharest is a city in upheaval, full of social contradictions and oppositions.
Accompanied by "Manele", traditional Romanian folk music, and local hip hop, we follow the footsteps of a figure carrying a door on his back through Bucharest. This absurd figure is taken from Romanian folklore, a "Pacala" (simpleton) of our day. He is both 'city guide' and inhabitant. The tension between the uncontrollable urban proliferation and the capability for improvisation and adaptation of the inhabitants results in the emotional dimension of the city.
1st Biennial of the National Gallery Prague, 2005

C錶in Dan, born 1955 in Romania, lives and works in Amsterdam & Bucharest
Django Hernández
Palabras, 2005
Video installation

Django Hernández is an international, extremely successful artist who works politically, translating his concerns in a broad artistic spectrum – from spatial and sound installations, videos, Internet animations to photos and drawings – into a poetic and thoroughly humorous language. Instead of supplying unequivocal answers, Django Hernández repeatedly raises questions: about the problematic relationship between America and Cuba, about the American self-image or the Cuban art of improvisation that was born of crisis and has become a permanent state.
In the video installation Palabras discarded telephone poles are seen leaning in the foreground, in the projection the presidents and prime ministers of socialist countries are played to the song "E penso ate" by Mina like a kind of credits roll. The telephone poles are a reference to the praise of communication technology in communist propaganda – in which a key role was attributed to electricity in Lenin's formulation "Communism – that is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country".
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Django Hernández, born 1970 in Cuba, lives and works in Havana and Düsseldorf

Adrian Paci
Turn On, 2004
Video

Adrian Paci is one of the few internationally known Albanian artists. This is due on the one hand to his participation in numerous biennials and on the other to the fact that his (artist) family immigrated to Italy. His artistic works – videos, painting, installations, photography – deal with living circumstances such as social inequality and migration.
The poetic video Turn on shows close-ups of the faces of unemployed Albanian men, who are regularly found on the steps of the city square of Shkodra, where the artist was born. One after another starts a noisy electrical generator to make a large light bulb glow. As the camera withdraws further and further, the entire staircase becomes visible with all the men hired for the project. What remains invisible is that some of the local residents thought the action was a political protest against the government and assembled, some of them waving flags. The electrical generators that are necessary for survival become a metaphor for the unstable infrastructure of the country since the end of communism, which Lenin had already symbolically equated with electricity. 51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Adrian Paci, born 1969 in Albania, lives and works in Milan
Juan Manuel EchavarríaBocas de ceniza / Mouths of Ashes, 2003
Series of 7 videos

Echavarria was a writer for thirty years before turning to fine arts to make use of the pictorial and documentary qualities of this medium for his socio-political concerns. In his photo series and video films he deals with the power of the drug cartel and various forms of violence in Columbia that have become – after fifty years of civil war – shockingly normal.

Bocas de ceniza /Mouths of Ashes – is what the Spanish conquerors of Columbia called the estuary mouth of the Magdalena River, so named because of the day of its discovery (Ash Wednesday). Today the name is cynically ambiguous: the corpses of victims of th

devastating drug wars are found floating in the river again and again. In the video Echavarria portrays the Afro-Columbians living on the Caribbean coast of Columbia. Most of them are poor farmers, until recently a minority with almost no rights caught between all the war fronts. In keeping with their oral traditions, they sing selfcomposed songs about their traumatic experiences.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Juan Manuel Echavarria, born in Medellin, Columbia, lives and works in Bogota.

Karl-Heinz Klopf
Mind the Steps, 2005 – 2006Interventions in Public SpaceA focal point of Karl-Heinz Kopf's artistic practice is built living space and its associated conditions, perceptions and sensations. In diverse media ranging from drawings and photography to videos and installations all the way to works for publicspace, he realizes his projects in the context of architecture and urbanism.
The work at the O.K is a continuation of his intervention in public space for the Istanbul Biennial 2005. Shots of five locations in the city district of Galata are shown in a large format projection, accompanied by the original sound of performanceand concerts taking place there.
Klopf turns phenomena of the urban development of Istanbul, such as the gaps in thecity that are bridged by individually arranged, often sculpture-like steps, into temporary spaces of action. He draws attention to this in-between space between the private and the public sphere, marking these sites of everyday social interaction and placing them in the spotlight as stages at night.
9th Istanbul Biennale, 2005

Karl-Heinz Klopf , born 1965 in Linz, lives and works in Vienna
http://www.expand.at

Johanna Billing
Magical World, 2005VideoMelancholy accompanies Johanna Billing's interpretations of changing social situations. In her precisely conceived films, she portrays people in posed situations with complex backgrounds. The extremely concentrated plots move between documentaryand fiction.

The film presented in O.K takes up the song “Magical World”, composed in 1968 by the Agro-
American Sidney Barnes, which is not explicitly political, but has become a symbol the 1960ies.
The film, shot in 2005 in Zagreb, moves between shots of a children's group in a musicroom singing this song, and outside shots of a cultural center. The socialist representational building from the eighties is one of the largest of its kind and presents a contrast to the upheaval that the Croatian children intone with the song.
9th Istanbul Biennale, 2005Johanna Billing, born 1973 in J?nk?ping, Sweden, lives and works in Stockholmhttp://www.makeithappen.org/johannabilling.html
Jakub MoravekStanding Ovation, 2001
Interactive video installationStanding Ovation is the graduation work by the young Czech artist Jakub Moravek at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. This video installation allows visitors to control the plot through their movements in the space, to change sides and become the ones viewed. A formally dressed group on the screen reacts to the visitor by applauding with increasing enthusiasm (controlled through floor sensors) as the person approaches theprojection.
The projection reacts promptly and individually to each action-triggering movement of the visitor in the space. Everyone, democratically and without exception, is cheeredregardless of achievement and met with thunderous applause. 1st Biennial of the National Gallery Prague, 2005

Jakub Moravek, born 1971 in Pribram, Czech Republic, lives and works in Munich www.jakub-moravek.de

Maider López727 x 800, 2005/2006
Floor and wall work

The works by the young Spanish artist Maíder Lopez move between art, design and architecture. Regardless of whether they involve furniture-like and thus also usable sculptures, colorful door mats, bright awnings or invented traffic signs in public space, her works are created in the context of art but have a use in everyday life. As in the work taken over from the Venice Biennale and site-specifically realized at
O.K, she plays with various functions and attributions. The former entrance foyer of the O.K is now a color-room. Every single wall surface was measured, a color assigned to it, and then it was labeled with the measurements. Here the colored walls are notonly walls, but also – loosely based on art-historical references (such as the American color field painting of the sixties) – monochrome paintings. Through this bright treatment, the space itself undergoes a new perception; it becomes a sculpture.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Maider López, born 1975 in San Sebastian, Spain, lives and works there.
www.maiderlopez.comIsabelle Krieg
Unerledigt, 2003/2005Installation

The installation consists of used coffee cups piled up in various plastic bowls ready for washing.
At a closer look the stains in the cups turn out to be drawings that were obviously based on newspaper pictures. The work was created at a time when the papers were full of reports about the Iraq War, thus providing an unusual contemporary document. What interests the artist even more than the specific occasion in this continuously further developed work, however, is reading the daily newspaper: regardless of whether it isthe horrors of war or high society news, there is always something "left over" (in the cup).
The pictures themselves, which are made of leftover coffee and cocoa, recall the tradition of reading coffee grounds and form an analogy to the "dirty laundry" that is washed every day in the media, illustrating the throw-away character of the deposited images.
1st Biennial of the National Gallery Prague, 2005Isabelle Krieg, born 1971 in Friburg, Switzerland, lives and works in Zurichttp://www.isabellekrieg.ch

Robin Rhode
3 videos / digital animationsHorse, 2002
New Kids on a Bike, 2002Marongrong, 2002

Robin Rhode's work centers around performances that have grown out experiences in the time of his youth and high school in the area of Johannesburg. He conjoins elements of street culture (sports, music, fashion) with the culture of "making art". He is convinced that art has an educational and practical function, which is also why hisperformances take place in "everyday space" – in the squares, streets and parks ofthe suburbs.
With charcoal he draws a motif on the wall, with which he then interacts "threedimensionally" and tells a story.
The three videos presented at O.K were created from a single camera setting, a perspective focused on the street from above. The single frames arranged one after another and animated result in witty and playful short films.51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Robin Rhode, born 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa, lives and works in BerlinCandice Breitz
Mother, 2005 & Father, 2005 2 six-channel video installations

In 2000, then as an aspiring artist, Candice Breitz received widespread attention with her first major institutional solo exhibition "Cuttings" at O.K. In the method of montage and collage that is typical for the artist, familiar Hollywood films supply the starting material that the artist digitally processes, newly structures according to her own script, and transfers into new contexts.Mother: A different well known American actress is seen on each of six screens in one of her roles as mother. The spectrum of the roles shows mother figures from different generations and of different characters, comprising a broad palette of actresses – Meryl Streep, Shirley McLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton and Faye Dunaway. The figures are taken out of the original film context, appearing in Candice Breitz' installation completely isolated in front of a black background. Their fictional dialogue lacks the film partner, so that their emotional reactions seem barely comprehensible. Yet a compelling atmosphere is created, in which the women arerelated to one another in "being mother" and seem to react to one another.
The installation "Father" contains scenes with Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, HarveyKeitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland and Jon Voight.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005Candice Breitz, born 1972 in Johannesburg, South Africa,lives and works in Berlin

Gerwald Rockenschaub
Untitled, 2001 – 2002
7 Flash animationsGerwald Rockenschaub is one of the most internationally renowned Austrian visual artists. His mode of working is characterized by the principle of concentration and reduction to a few essential elements and structures. With his pictures, objects, animations and installations, Rockenschaub refers equally to ideas of positions ofmodernism and phenomena of everyday and pop culture.
In the early 1980s he created small format oil paintings; a few years later the use of industrially manufactured materials and machine production modes marked a profoundchange in Rockenschaub's work.
In addition to his investigations of the (exhibition) space as a complex social structure, the use of digital means offers Rockenschaub new possibilities. The video installation selected for the O.K is the translation of a panel picture into moving images and thus a continuation of Gerwald Rockenschaub's form language andinvestigation of the art system.
1st Biennial of the National Gallery Prague, 2005Gerwald Rockenschaub, born 1952 inLinz, lives and works in Berlin and Vienna

Markus HuemerEs gibt Situationen im Leben, da ist das Schicksal ganz klar auf meiner Seite, 2005
[There are situations in life when fate is clearly on my side]Acrylic and oil on canvas
rague Biennial 2, 2005

Seit 1194 Tagen ohne Zungenkuss. Davor 1721. Seit 314 Tagen ohne Date. Davor 945. Seit 19 Tagen ohne erotischen Blickkontakt., 2005
[Since 1194 days without a French kiss. Before that 1721. Since 314 days without adate. Before that 945. Since 19 days without erotic eye contact]
Video installationIn his work Markus Huemer conjoins media art with themes from classical fine art, referring to art-historical issues and contextualizations, whereby questioning the specific medium plays a central role in his work. In his artistic investigations, which he calls painterly mannerism, he always places the medium and the technique for disposition as well, relating works charged with art-historical references to reducedformal setting and poetic titles.
The canvas work shown here relates to the art-internal discourse on painting, occasionally pronounced dead and meanwhile alive and well again. In the exhibition aO.K he juxtaposes this work with a video installation.

Markus Huemer, born 1968 in Linz, lives and works in Berlin

Black Market Worlds
BMW – IX Baltic Triennial, Vilnius, 2005

Daniel Bozhkov /S/US, Roberto Cuoghi /I, Ignacio González Lang /MEX/US, Loris Gréaud /F, Juozas Laivys /LT, Gabriel Lester /B /US, Christelle Lheureux /F + Apichatpong Weerasethakul / TW, Jonathan Monk /GB/DT; Melvin Moti /NL, Arturas Raila /LT, Bruno Serralongue /F, Laura Stasiulyte /LT, Markus Schinwald /A/DT, Mirjam Wirz / LT

Disguise and deceive all the way down the line – that is the essence of the 9th Baltic Triennial that was realized as a major "thematic exhibition" with 48 artists in 2005 at CAC in Vilnius. Instead of making a "selection", a new "Linz version" was developed for "Biennale Cuvée".

Even the title of the show is confusing: "Black Market Worlds" is not – as one might expect – a discussion of economic circumstances in the post-communist society of Lithuania. Indeed, however, the title refers associatively to certain structural characteristics that have been transferred from the world of the black market to art and further developed there: objects and depictions, whose meaning is puzzling, which are faked, or whose origins are unclear; information of uncertain authenticity, that is cryptic or passed on under the table. A common theme in the conventional sense cannot be identified on the basis of the works, except that ghostly, occult or magical occurrences are visualized throughout the exhibition, and preference is given to the use of invisible channels like the electronic network, telephone cables and energy fields.

It is characteristic of the curators' strategy that those involved in the project proposed over fifty alternative titles. Before the exhibition, instead of the usual promotional measures rumors were spread, and action-based or performative art events were staged using the methods of guerrilla marketing, of which only traces, memories or fragments are present in the exhibition. Regarding the curatorial intentions and the individual art works – all the way to concrete descriptions of the works – contradictory, confusing information was spread, or none at all. Nothing is as it seems – all lies and deceptions? Or not? The curators and the artists with them carry on a mysterious, ironic, pleasurably creative game with the visitors and the expectations associated with a representative exhibition format.

At the heart of the exhibition are curtains made of black plastic tarpaulins, as they are used "underground" in construction work, for instance to prevent water pipes from leaking. The individual art works hide, vanish and disguise themselves in this omnipresent exhibition architecture. For "Biennale Cuvée" the tarpaulins are arranged in the large hall in a labyrinthine structure.

Press information: Maria Falkinger, O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Dametzstr. 30, 4020 Linz, AT. www.ok-centrum.at