Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter, Franziska & Lois Weinberger / Austrian Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale

Commissioned by Valie Export and Silvia Eiblmayr, the Austrian Pavilion at the 53rd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2009 presents works by Elke Krystufek, Dorit Margreiter, and Franziska & Lois Weinberger.

Elke Krystufek’s work “Tabou Taboo” deals with different topics: Polynesia being regarded as a mythical place of liberated life and eroticism in European art, and the question of a “female curiosity”. Elke Krystufek approaches this theme by using a camera and working with a male nude mode. She then transforms these photographs in drawings and paintings, some of them applied directly onto the wall. The title “Tabou Taboo” is a reference to the film Tabu (1931) filmed on location in Polynesia by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, as well as to Sigmund Freud’s book Totem und Tabu (1912 – 13), and the Polynesian origins of the word taboo. Elke Krystufek replaces the word Austria on the exterior facade of the pavilion with the (German) word Tabu.

Dorit Margreiter’s installation “Pavilion” (2009) is a film about the place it is shot: the pavilion itself, built by Josef Hoffmann and opened in 1934 in the Giardini of Venice. It is a grainy black-and-white film with a surreal character.

Inside the pavilion Franziska & Lois Weinberger present an installation of objects, drawings, photographs and texts from the 1970s to the present day. Outside the pavilion they have set up an accessible architecture erected between the pavilion and the canal entitled “Laubreise”. “The decay of the heap is created by time / that makes it possible / to notice a small part of the larger change, and to transform the space for art into a space for the existential” (Franziska & Lois Weinberger).

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