Electronic Sound in a Shifting Landscape at Dazibao

With a new baby in the house, I couldn’t manage to escape on holiday this summer, but this past weekend, at Dazibao artist-run centre, I was offered the opportunity to imaginatively revisit a faraway destination I’ve spent some time in: the iconic city of Vienna. Electronic Sound in a Shifting Landscape is a group exhibition of experimental film and video spanning the last forty years that uses the city of Vienna and its fabricated landscape not only as content, but also as conceptual device.



Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Mountain View, 1999

Carefully curated by Montreal-based artist and musician Steve Bates, the exhibition features work by fourteen artists in a tightly choreographed sequence of videos spread over three projections and as many monitors. The works on monitor draw you into the space, with one in the front window, a second one on the first facing wall, and the third on the gallery’s back wall. Only one of the fifteen projected works plays at a time, thus allowing the viewers’ attention to focus more intently.

The stand out works are perhaps the less overtly digitally inclined, such as Peter Wiebel’s Depiction is a Crime from 1970 and Hans Scheugl’s Wein 17, Schumanngasse from 1967. That said, they both invoke the technology of image making: the former filming a Polaroid being taken of the film crew in the manicured grounds of Schönbrunn Castle, and the latter using the length of time it takes to develop a role of film to determine the time and velocity it takes to drive down a Viennese street.

My only issue with this exhibition is directed at Dazibao rather than the exhibition itself. As is obvious from the exhibition’s title, sound plays a vital role in many of these films (or lack-there-of in others), and it was a shame that sound from separate programming – The Otolith Group in the gallery’s cinema room – could be clearly heard in the main space when the door was left frequently ajar. This meant it was often difficult to distinguish what was what. Keep the door closed, but remember that the five films by The Otolith Group are also not to be missed.


Dazibao: http://dazibao-photo.org/en/
Electronic Sound in a Shifting Landscape continues until September 13.


Susannah Wesley is an artist and curator living in Montreal. She has been a member of the collaborative duo Leisure since 2004 and from 1997-2000 was part of the notorious British art collective the Leeds13. Formerly Director at Battat Contemporary in Montreal, she holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. She is Akimblog's new Montreal correspondent and can be followed @susannahwesley1 on Twitter.