Marine Hugonnier - Ana Hanusova (2001)
Friday, May 9, 2008
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"In the year 2000, I was asked by Camera Austria, an Austrian art magazine, to contribute to an issue published in response to the election of October 1999. This request gave me the opportunity to rethink, in a context of political and social imperatives, the role of artistic activity. After spending some time envisaging what a gesture in response to Camera Austria would require (a rethink of my relationship to History), I decided to invite a women, who had been part of one of the orchestras in the concentration camps to come and play a piece of music of her choice which would be broadcast live on the Austrian national radio channel, O1." - Marine Hugonnier
"I spent long months doing research which led me to meet a few survivors. I'm not sure that, for the first meetings, I was particularly convincing. Many of them wanted to forget. This raised the question of programmed memory loss and collective amnesia concerning history. These first meetings discouraged me for a time. I suddenly realized that there was certain legitimacy in the desire to forget - my own grandfather had never wanted to talk to me about what happened to him, pushing his refusal to confront the past to the point of never even going to see a war film at the cinema. I remained convinced, however, that it was still possible to confront this history with our everyday existence.
The video recording, which was filmed during the live broadcast on national radio O1 of Anna Hanusova's performance, includes images of Vienna. This images show the International Atomic Energy Authority, the UN building, the oil refinery (Olraffinerie Schwechat), the Sony and Microsoft buildings, the big wheel (the Riesenrad) and the Prater amusement park surrounding it, the Karl Marx Hof, a cinema in Vienna and the number 05 which the symbol of resistance in Austria. These various images, which punctuate the film, enable me to go beyond the political conflict specific to Austria and to place the event in an international context. These different images are to be seen as signs of our contemporary world at the dawn of cybernetics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the mapping of DNA." - Marine Hugonnier
�Marine Hugonnier�s artworks are infused with her long-standing interest in the discipline of anthropology. They focus on and act out the differences between one type of perception and another: specifically the historical, social, and political ramifications of how we deal with our orientation in the present moment. That Hugonnier�s work does this makes it a covertly socio-political statement that refuses, and seeks to short-circuit in viewers on a one-by-one basis, the consensus of unthinking forward motion, routine of distraction, and easy amnesia prevalent amongst the occupants of big cities. Making works which consistently pull off this trick means never using the same aesthetic approach twice: over the past few years Hugonnier has slowly but steadily constructed an expandix of quiet unassuming and discrete works which viewers are bounced in slow motion, re-orientated and ref-framed in case by the slow, surprising transmission of the artwork�s qualities and its pervasive effect on their perceptual abilities." - Martin Herbert, Today is Yesterday's tomorrow from Marine Hugonnier, CGAC, 2001
Marine Hugonnier was born in Paris in 1969 and grew up in the United States and France; lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized by Centro Galego de Arte Contempor�nea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Kerstin Engholm Gallery, Vienna; and Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris. Her group exhibitions have included Spiritus, Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall; Travers�es, l'ARC, Mus�e d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Squatters, Fundac�o de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, Site Santa Fe's Fourth, International Biennial, New Mexico; My Generation, Atlantis Gallery, London; Movimientos Inmoviles, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; and Marine Hugonnier & Henrik Plenge Jakobson, Centre d�Art Neuch�tel, Neuch�tel, Swizterland.
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at 12:32 PM