Marx Halle was once the site of Vienna’s cattle market, its floors trampled by hooves and the hectoring footsteps of bartering butchers and farmers, while cows mooed in busy protest against their impending slaughter. Today the Neu Marx area in the Austrian capital’s 3rd district is full of thriving media and tech startups, and the old wrought-iron Marx Halle, in the very centre of the hubbub, is the location for a friendlier form of exchange.
But there was still plenty at stake at the commencement of viennacontemporary, which has swiftly gained a reputation as the most prominent art fair in Eastern Europe. This year it boasted 112 galleries from 28 countries, all part of an expanding selection that included ‘Nordic Highlights’ and a focus on ‘Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania’. We at The Shimmering Ostrich would love to be able to show you each and every piece that went on display, but short attention spans – both yours and ours – prohibit us to a top five, which should at least give you an indication of viennacontemporary’s most startling images and heat-seeking trends.
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1. ERNST | SCHLOCKHAUSER (Berlin)
You’ve probably heard of the phrase verbal diarrhoea, but never before has the sentiment been so thoroughly entwined with the news. Reminding us that diarrhoea also comes from the bottom, the Turin-born, Berlin-based artist Artifoni Bofine presented in this one-man show inside the ERNST | SCHLOCKHAUSER booth the remnants of a morning spent gorging – quite literally – on the daily newspapers. Swallowed down with glassfuls of prune juice, the whole lot swiftly appeared out the other end, a little brown and mulchy but more or less intact. And with a vivid splatter covering the white brick, Bofine expressed something of the vulgarity of the everyday written word, beyond its ephemeral and otherwise dubious qualities.
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Grimmer und Gelb (Dresden)
The energy drink brand Red Bull bolsters its image through a series of lucrative sports deals, perhaps best known for its acquisition of football and motor racing teams, but also sustaining the world of extreme sport. In an ironic twist, Andrew Beckindorff left loitering within the Grimmer und Gelb booth an almost unidentifiable skateboard, its wheels replaced with Red Bull cans – ironic because aluminium cans, of course, cannot skate. Attempt a grind or a kickflip with one of these bad boys and you’ll be telling Red Bull to go shove it, which is presumably precisely what Beckindorff intended to say, with this wry comment on the world of cross-cultural commerce.
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Galerie Franz Dreyer (Lucerne)
In the Solo Expanded section dedicated to dual-artist presentations, Marie Entlicken (her booth counterpart holds no interest for us) took a warped gaze at the world of mobile photography. Sixty-six Instagram miniatures turned green viscerally conjured the many-eyed monster, that envy all of us sometimes feel as we flick through our feeds and wonder at the lives ostensibly being enjoyed by others.
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Skrat Le Contempe (Warsaw)
A clever conceit, the acclaimed Warsaw studio Skrat Le Contempe presented this multimedia exhibit courtesy of Jerzy Lewandosi from Gdansk. Lewandosi attached an Android phone to a projector, beaming a modern version of the early arcade game Pong through an old cathode ray tube television screen. The result cuts across time periods, confounding expectations around contemporary technology and the authenticity of vintage wares, anachronistic in a way that truly becomes great art. While his projector busily projected, Lewandosi had also placed speakers around the booth, their bleeps and blips leaving visitors wondering whether the Pong ball might hit them.
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ZOSO Bra. Industrizeit (Vienna)
Lurking in plain sight within the ZONE 1 section for younger artists, Malerie Onze’s simple line drawings could have been mistaken for mere scribbles or smudges on the wall. Instead they were the careful tracings of shadows from aged and withered combs, some dating back as far as the Egyptians. The makeshift sculptures and their accompanying shadow-sketches somehow seemed to call out ‘I remember running through you’, an echo from the past at once hairy and poetic.
