Anja Ronacher. Immateriality and Matter
Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2014 - 19:00 Uhr
Ve.Sch Schikanedergasse
Anna Hofbauer, Anja Ronacher
AH: Can you tell us about how you were led to the antique objects shown in your recent works?
AR: I have been researching the relationship of art and the gift (looking at objects that are treated in the museums as art but were originally produced for gift-giving, sometimes for their own destruction). Many objects I photograph are funerary equipment, they were made out of clay (which is earth) to be buried again, invisible to the living. There is a lavishness and beauty in this act that seems impossible in our utilitarian and enlightened society. Some of the objects I have photographed were buried until the 19th or 20th century and were only then unearthed by archeologists.
AH: What is your relationship to the idea/institution of a museum?
AR: Perhaps museums play a crucial role for a spirituality that has been lost, a futile invocation of the ancestors in a struggle against the terrifying void. This struggle against could also be a struggle for nothingness. The historic discontinuity of the objects is brought to a contemporaneity in their presence in the museum. Here contemporary culture assembles, archives and categorizes them: presence of all times.
AH: How do you decide on your representation of the objects?
AR: All objects I photograph are shown in their (now) original context. Some of them are placed inside vitrines, I am interested in the distance the vitrine creates, it resembles the distance we encounter in the image. Framing has become an important device for showing this distance, in the same time I try to get closer. Like the photographic image the objects remain withdrawn in a space beyond touch.
AH: Some archaeological interpretations are as representative for the time that they have been created in as ideas and aesthetics of science fiction movies or books. Do you have a favorite story of some historic object or site – scientifically proven or not – that you care to share with us?
AR: White ground lekythoi were used in ancient greece as funerary equipment. On one of the lekythoi in the work „white ground lekythos“ we see a depiction of a small winged figure above the head of the deceased, this „Eidola“ (shadow figure) represents the soul.
AH: Your works also deal with questions about methods and materials of cultural identification. What is Europe 2013 for you?
AR: Knowing subjects and proprietors, the museum seems an emblematic space. Perhaps the recurrence of antiquity in contemporary art shows a need to rethink the ground of human artistic activity, searching for ” a new logic (…) one that grasps the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason.“ (Deleuze in Bartleby; or, the formula), open to an affective intensity and enchantment beyond knowledge.