Xenia Hausner: »Fremde in einer stereotypen Welt«
Space installation from 16 to 24 March 2024 – Reflektor André Heller
Rootlessness and disconnection
André Heller has already crossed paths with the Austrian artist Xenia Hausner several times: most recently at the Berlin State Opera, where André Heller gave his opera debut with »Der Rosenkavalier« and thereby came upon Hausner, who worked as a set designer at the leading opera houses in London, Vienna and Salzburg. In his »Reflektor«, André Heller adds another facet to the common festival thread »Foreign is the foreigner only in a foreign land« with Hausner’s large-scale, colourful paintings, projected gigantically onto the walls around the concerts in the Grand Hall Foyer.
»My subjects not only stand for migration here in the current sense, but broadly for rootlessness and disconnection. I am familiar with being powerless,« the artist says of her series of works entitled »Exiles«. Her various works were inspired, amongst other things, by the refugee movements of 2015. Images that we retained in our collective memory through the media and which the artist elaborately reconstructed beforehand in spatial settings with models in order subsequently to bring them onto canvas in oil. However, there are also her numerous works on a traditionally stereotypical world of gender roles, which convey feelings of foreignness and which have turned the artist into a pioneer of international gender art in the past three decades.
Festival
Reflektor André Heller