MARTIN BREINDL Shared Curatorial Practice | lecture and workshop

Martin Breindl  21–22.03.2019

 21 March

• lecture (building E room 12 – Wolnica 9) 17.00–18.30
  for students from the Faculty of Art Education and Curatorial Studies and the Faculty of Media Arts
• workshop (building E room 34 – Wolnica 9) 18.45–20.15
  workshop classes for student from the Faculty of Art Education and Curatorial Studies

 22 March

• workshop (building B – UAP Printshop) 11.00–18.00
  workshop classes for student from the Faculty of Art Education and Curatorial Studies

Martin Breindl, Shared Curatorial Practice

Lecture and Workshop in Poznan, 2019

As an artist I have always been interested in transdisciplinary practice. Educated as a visual artist I soon started to work with different media and technologies. Seeing limitations in my abilities to handle these techniques I found no sense in doing all by my own. So I started to collaborate with other artists, theoreticians, scientists and technicians of different provenance. In 1997 I founded alien productions (in collaboration with Andrea Sodomka, Norbert Math and August Black), an artists’ network for works in new technology and media.

In my individual as well as collaborative work I am interested in projects which attempts to involve different agencies into a collaborative process between control and sharing : How, in a joint effort, can we learn to give or share control – not just with the other artists involved in the project, but with other (human and non-human) intelligences? Artist have learned to act participatory and to invite others to take part in the production of art works. This has changed a lot in production and perseption of art works during the last decades. But how do we deal with this in a curatorial practice? How to re-think, evaluate, adapt and mediate contemporary artistic ideas in the conception, design and realisation of exhibition and projects?

In addition to my artistic work I included theory and curating as an even broader shared process. In my opinion there is no strict division between creating (role of an artist) and mediating (role of a curator). I will show a few examples of my work in a curatorial  team for FLUSS – the society for promotion of photo and media lower austria, namely the exhibition projects “The Amber Road Show” (2013) and “Images, Tropes and Narratives : Sharing Control” (2018), my contributions for the photographic Triennial “Backlight” in Tampere, FIN, “Untouchable Things” (2005) and “Tickle Attack” (2008), and the overall design of the retrospective show of the Austrian Artist Heinz Cibulka “The Cadence of Light and Dark” (2012/13) in the MZM Mistelbach, A, and CoCa Torun, PL.

Martin Breindl, born 1963 in Vienna, Austria, is media artist, theoretician and curator. He studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (Mag.art 2001) and at theUniversity of Vienna. He is founder of alien productions (in collaboration with Andrea Sodomka, Norbert Math and August Black), an artists’ network for works in new technology and media. He works in the fields of media-performance, installation, net.art, radio art, sound art, video art and visual arts. Since 2001 he is one of the curators of FLUSS – society for the promotion of photo- and media art, based in Wolkersdorf, Austria; from 2005 to 2008 co-curator of the International Photographic Triennial Backlight in Tampere, FIN. Since 2018 he has been teaching a course at the School of Art, Dept. of Art, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University. Martin Breindl’s solo as well as alien production’s group projects have been realisedand shown at numerous festivals, gallery and museum shows.