AS BIRDS FLYING
2016
Video, 6’43’’
presented at CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna; CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

In late 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork suspected of espionage due to an electronic device attached to its leg. “As Birds Flying” addresses conspiracies embedded in the political landscape that shape the present. It confronts the absurdity of the media narrative that has blurred fantasy with realty and turned a bird, that migrates from Israel to Egypt, into a symbol of state paranoia. The film juxtaposes drone footage of the “spy bird” with reconstructed audio from Adel Imam’s iconic film “Birds of Darkness” (1995) which critiques government corruption in Egypt through the opposing perspectives of secular and Islamist parliamentary candidates.

OPERATION SUNKEN SEA
Photographs and HD video, 2018
presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna; and Climbing Through the Tides, Tunis

Invested in the power of technology to generate a new future for humankind, "OPERATION SUNKEN SEA" initiates a large-scale infrastructural intervention unparalleled in scale. A new era of human progress will be initiated through the draining and rerouting of the Mediterranean Sea to converge Africa and Europe into one supercontinent. The operation promises to bring an end to terrorism and the migration crisis, provide employment and energy alternatives and confront the rise of fascism, all of which pose profound existential threats to our future. The project instills a fervent movement towards technocracy which takes a proactive stance towards the reparation of Africa and the Middle East by relocating the Mediterranean Sea within the continent.

Expanding upon early twentieth century techno-utopian visions, "OPERATION SUNKEN SEA" investigates the abundance to be acquired from the significant transformation of territorial constructs. It responds to the contemporary moment of political uncertainty in Europe, the unrest and collapse of nation-states in the Middle East, the neo-liberal failure of globalization in Africa by shifting the paradigm in a time of neo-fascist necropolitics. The operation instigates enterprise, invention and ingenuity with a new vision for Africa and the Middle East. It pinpoints what could be attained by and for those most affected in the last century by the wars waged for oil, resources and power.

TRANSITIONAL MAGNETISM
Etching on paper, video, sculpture, and 3D print
2017-2018
presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

Charles Bell says that “the brain receives more trustworthy information from the touch of the hand than from images in the eye”. Merleau – Ponty studies the tactile phenomena and the exploratory movement as non-visual realities that connect subject and environment.

"Transitional Magnetism" proposes a journey through the different phases to engrave an image on copper looking back to the work of master printers such as Jean Cousin, Abraham Bosse and José Ribera. The project is displayed in the format of installation combining traditional means of printing with modern 3D printing techniques and experimental ink casting methods that relate to the origins and principals of the etching technique.

Exploring the ways of questioning the necessary skills to be acquired to make an imprint on a copper plate, the pieces interrogate the dialogue between the trace left by the hands and the use of tools. The sense of touch and the need of getting a grip with the hands question whether touching furnishes the brain a different kind of sensate information than the eye, hence the attraction between the maker and the outside world, between his/her hands and the materials..

TOWARDS SAMADHI
Installation in four parts
WAVE: Monotype. Kozo paper roll and ink, 2500x46cm
VOID: Sculpture. Perspex tubes, 100x1,50cm
FULL: Sculpture. Perspex tubes, 100x10cm
FLOW: Audio piece. Soundtrack 1-hour loop Soundtrack
2018-ongoing
presented atCrossSections_intensities (2018), Vienna; and Climbing Through the Tides, Tunis

The term "Samādhi" (in Sanskrit) etymologically means “complete” (sam) “absorption” (adhi). In Eastern philosophies and practices, it refers to a state of meditative consciousness. In Samādhi the mind becomes still, so does the body. It is a state of being totally aware of the present moment; a one-pointedness of mind.

Paper is an organic material with the capacity of absorbing ink. Perspex is a synthetic material which repels and only holds ink on a superficial level. A roller is needed to extend the ink and transfer it to the perspex plate. It is the medium between the ink, the matrix, and the paper. These complementary elements with opposing qualities are involved in the repetitive process of printing a blend over and over again over a 25 meter paper roll. They are presented to explore (materially and metaphorically) the intricate nature of walking towards what is called “Samadhi” to translate what could be such state of blend.

It is said that pair of opposites are situated on the other or further side when seen from a specified or implicit viewpoint; facing. There is, however, a point where they inevitably touch each other.

FLAYING/VESTIGIUM OF A HUMAN PRINT
Installation with objects, sculptures, etchings, dry ink and video, 1’23’’
2018-2019
presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019)(2019), Helsinki

Imprints are not always easily perceptible. A black wrinkly material with no special appeal can contain delicate and precious information that the eye cannot see at first glance. The fragile action of ripping it off can turn into a ceremony in which a flaying is not an act of violence anymore. Instead it becomes a means of a discovery.

Three symbols: baculum, hands, and eyes. Three materials: copper, ink, and cement. Three formats: sculpture, printmaking, and light print. A traced diagram of triangulations where materiality, fragmentation and bonds are having a conversation.

The installation “Vestigium of a Human Imprint”, together with the video “Flaying”, present a series of pieces that navigate between the archaeological finding, the relic, the historical object and the close observation of a delicate and queer process of detachment where the touch is always involved. Ink, silicone, oxide, fingerprints, copper and cement are gathered together to experiment with the manifold possibilities that the etching technique offers to explore the nature of a trace left behind, an imprint that presents relationships between humans as makers of images and the materials as mediums to follow the trail of its origins.

DANCE/KNOWLEDGE/POLITICS/TANZ/WISSEN/POLITIK (working title)
Research Material
2018
presented at  CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna

Politics are not located directly in dance, but in the way dance manages to occupy (cultural) space.
Mark Franko

The Volksheim Ottakring (today Volkshochschule Ottakring) was founded in 1901 and was of great cultural and political importance, especially in the interwar years. Adult education centres were an important hub of education and knowledge transfer and played a unique role in the popularisation of art and culture beyond the bourgeois salons.

The starting points of Isa Rosenberger’s research on the history and the present of the VHS Ottakring are the performances and the courses that the dancer and choreographer Rosalia Chladek offered at the VHS Ottakring in the 1930s.

THE CITY IS WAITING (working title)
Mixed media, 2018
presented at  CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

How can we – from a contemporary perspective – recall and update the largely forgotten social reforming history of the VHS Ottakring?

And in accordance with the interdisciplinary working method of Gertrud Kraus, how can we understand dance as a specific poetic space in which art forms, times and images can be recombined and new relations and cross-references created?

The presentation at Kunsthalle Exnergasse gives insight into a long-term project: The starting point is a performance of the dance piece The City is Waiting by dancer and choreographer Gertrud Kraus on the – still existing – theater stage of the adult education center Ottakring in Vienna in 1933. Sociopolitically interested and increasingly under pressure because of her Jewish background, Kraus developed as one of the few exponents of expressive dance choreographies that showed political commitment. Her choreography The City is Waiting, based on a fairy tale by Maxim Gorki, is reflecting both the fears and fascination of a boy – she herself dances – in the big city. The Volksheim Ottakring (today Volkshochschule Ottakring) was founded in 1901 and – using the slogan: The Knowledge for All – was of great cultural and political importance, especially in the interwar years. Adult education centres were an important hub of education and knowledge transfer and played a unique role in the popularisation of avant-garde art and culture beyond the bourgeois salons.

... THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES
Video, 12’’
2019
presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019),Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

In 1934 the theatre stage of the Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna presented Gertrud Kraus’s* dance play “Die Stadt wartet” (The City Waits),** which was based on Maxim Gorky’s fairy tale “Musik der Großstadt”(The Music of the Big City). Her choreography reflected the way of a youth into the city and both the fear and the fascination of discovering and living in a big city as a young boy—Gertrud Kraus herself danced the role of the boy. “Interested in socio-political conditions and increasingly under pressure because of her Jewish heritage, she was one of the few exponents of expressive dance to develop art forms and choreographies that demonstrated political engagement. However, as a historical lapse, there is no visual document capturing the performance of the dance play “The City waits” at Volksheim Ottakring . The project is an attempt to reflect on this lapse.

ANTECKNIGER TILL EN FILM ON NATUREN [NOTES FOR A FILM ON NATURE]
—with Oscar Mangione
B/W Lambda print, projected video, 9’51’’
2016
presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

Lina Selander and Oscar Mangiones work “Anteckningar till en film om naturen” (Notes for a Film on Nature) is a film projected on a photograph depicting a former courtroom, now an exhibition space, where a screen have been placed on the judges’ position. Anteckningar till en film om naturen is also an overwriting film, a palimpsest. The work seeks positions and outposts on the border between nature and image. Here is the dream of the empty gaze, of death, of montage as the opposite of nature.

ÖVERFÖRINGSDIAGRAM NR 1 [DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 1]
—with Oscar Mangione
Film,colour and sound, 8’30’’
2017
presented at CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

This film is a modest, but well articulated within its capacity, attempt to make itself into a kind of recitation that formalises anamnesis. The film contains sets of images, correspondences, and movements that resemble each other: Nostalgia, Violence and History, Memory, Hope and Technology. These sets are intersected and interrupted by their own dreams, mutations and deformations. The destruction of books and other memory devices and the twin practice of piecing together scrap paper fragments in search of a redeeming knowledge is a kind of soul that becomes the past turned inside out, a sun that never sets. But this never setting soul of knowledge is exactly what the film refuses to be. Undulating like a snake on the ground, the film is that which is immediately apparent. Or, if something else, perhaps a pure outside — the fleeting fantasies and abstractions of others. Coincident and incompatible with both itself and that which we know to be real. Whether or not the film is successful in its ambition (if success is possible at all) is less important than the ambition itself. This vision of uncertainty that opens the viewer to contemplation of each fleeting image: the bust of the king of Uruk, the dove and the parrot, the seventeenth century engraving, the two dogs (is two even accurate), the children dancing and drawing, the Ouroboros[1] in the guillotine, and the warming fire at the end.

Diagram of Transfer No. 1 was originally made as a comment on an earlier work, "When the Sun Sets It's All Red, Then It Disappears" (from 2008). This work took Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise" (from 1967) as its starting point and examined the dreams, hopes, and misfortunes related to the 1968 student revolt as well as its representation and current significance for the "left".

It may not be entirely un-constructive to view "Diagram of Transfer No. 1" in relation to Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Especially, regarding the role of the images and the way they are regarded, or presented, as constituting a whole — between the systems of discipline and (advancing) control — in this film and in others. Containers, enclosures, tunnels, connectors, managers, information, modulating principles, actors or actions, services, commodities, and statistical entities perfectly adapt to the current and coming order. It's up to us to discover what we are being made to serve. “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”[2]

[1] The Ouroboros seems to have a choice — hard to make admittedly. It is a choice that has to be made alone (the viewer is but a bystander and witnesses) yet one that highly concerns the film and what to make of it.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992)

ÖVERFÖRINGSDIAGRAM NR 2 [DIAGRAM OF TRANSFER NO. 2]
—with Oscar Mangione
Film
16 mm transferred to HD-video, colour and sound, 10’35’
2019
presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

Man sees himself as nature’s interpreter and tamer. But nature does not care about meaning, and its power cannot actually be controlled. It therefore remains silent in the face of man’s increasingly reckless experiment, the catastrophic effects of which will ultimately afflict man himself. The camera follows a panda at Schönbrunner Zoo surrounded by pictures of the Great Wall of China. Silently the panda holds a bamboo brush to paper, makes some marks with ink—pictures—and is rewarded with carrots. How shall we interpret this artistic gesture? The video proceeds to a control room at a never-used nuclear power plant that illustrates yet another despotic panorama, one with the same silence and latent violence. The images are transferred from one context to another, created and recreated in relation to one another. To question what it means is only human, but in the long run probably irrelevant.

The text written by Lisa Rosendahl.

SYRIA 2016
Video
6’20’’ (loop)
presented at  CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna

For this first CrossSections exhibition of work in process, Marcus Neustetter presents a selection of previous works created in Vienna, the works reflect on Neustetter’s observations of the space and its relationship to and dialogue with cultures not originally from Austria. An example of this is the video piece Syria, created by exploring collections of Syrian artifacts within the Weltmuseum in Vienna, by turning off the storage room lights and moving through the archives with a torch Neustetter creates somewhat abstracted shadow-scape films that translate artifacts in to metaphors and evoke enquiries in to the positions Syrian people living in Austria occupy.

SWEEP MEXICO – MONTEZUMA
2016-2017
Stop frame animation
1’30’’sec (loop)
presented at  CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna

In early January 2018 Neustetter has created engaged, experimental light performances with thousands of participants on the streets of Merida. Together people are encouraged to create large light drawings related to their individual and collective identities. Interestingly, one such light drawing is the headdress of Montezuma, an Aztec feather artifact currently held by the Welt Museum in Vienna and a source of dispute between Mexico and Austria.

BETWEEN BORDER LINES
2018
Video installation
presented at  CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna

In his installation, which is the outcome of the artist’s drawing performance, Neustetter traces borders of contested territories directly onto the wall. Using a microscope attached to a projector the artist performs speculative mark making and amplifies movement and migration in response to found sound elements.

ENCOUNTERS
Installation with carved linoleum, ink prints, paper wood and enamel paint
2018
presented at  CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna;

The title of this piece references a work Marcus Neustetter produced in Linz with Stephen Hobbs in 2016, where a path was renamed as the “Weg der Begegnung” (Path of Encounters) by immigrants communities, the artist, Ars Electronica and the city of Linz as a welcoming gesture to the arriving refugees.

In the process of finding the name, conversations about repurposing public space, breaking of internal borders and reimagining more multi-cultural cities became a further point of inspiration for Neustetter in Europe. This process was especially relevant in relation to his own uncertainty of place within his home country, South Africa.

Through site-specific, performative, visual inquiries Neustetter has created a kind of expression that probes real world dynamics, such as forced migration and lost identity with intuitive, process driven artistic tools.

This performative installation “Encounters” is an extension of his process. Neustetter continues his exploration of his 2017 work for the exhibition CrossSections_Potentials titled “Between Border Lines”. He draws and then scrambles a map to reconfigure contested territories. Accompanied by the static sound of an FM radio, a visual map of personal notes and a ladder for perspective, he attempts to reassemble his drawing.

SEARCHING THE LINE
Lino print installation and video, 8’45’’
2019
presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

Marcus Neustetter has been investigating personal territories with invisible borders in a new series of performative interventions for the CrossSections exhibition series. In a recent trip to the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea, Neustetter was struck by the curiosity of the space that defines the relationship of North and South. He became obsessed in capturing the articulations of the unreachable defining line. A line that is as much a physical manifestation of political and idealogical differences as it is a symbol of personal separations. Searching the Line becomes an act of mediative contemplation summarised in a looped short film and a drawn intervention.

SHIFTING TERRITORIES
2019
Installation, video and durational performance
CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

Marcus Neustetter has been investigating personal territories with invisible borders in a new series of performative interventions for the CrossSections exhibition series. In a recent trip to the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea, Neustetter was struck by the curiosity of the space that defines the relationship of North and South. He became obsessed in capturing the articulations of the unreachable defining line. A line that is as much a physical manifestation of political and idealogical differences as it is a symbol of personal separations. Shifting territories is a performance intervention that responds to a video loop produced on this journey and is a reflection on Neustetter's personal conflict in his relocation from South to North - from his current home in South Africa to Europe.

FIGURING VITALITY
Video, Object and Drawing/Video/Objekt und Zeichnung
2015-2018
presented at  CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna; CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019)(2019), Helsinki

Nikolaus Gansterer understands the processes of thinking and drawing as analogous. He is thus concerned with the fundamental question of how to translate processes of thought, and explores how the act of drawing can become a tool of communication. To approach the materiality of perception Gansterer applies a unique performative grammar, in which the artist’s flow of observations in relation to his environment manifest as captivating live drawings, diagrams and arrangements. He questions how these situative constructions of meaning could be expanded towards a radical autopoiesis: where a line of thought becomes a line on paper, turns into a line in space, and then again a line articulated with the whole body or transforms into an object.

The animation film "Figuring Vitality" (2015) enables to experience a blackboard as resonating body and site of knowledge transfer. Gansterer projects a dynamic spatial structure which is constantly formed by vitality forces that dissolve the boundaries between inner and outside world, unveiling the process of “figuring something out”.

UNTERTAGÜBERBAU
HD Video, stereo soundtrack, 16”03’, drawings and animation
2017
(sound by Martin Siewert)
presented at  CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

Nikolaus Untertagüberbau was created in the studio whilst the artist listened to scientific radio programmes and conjures the sense of laboratories, measurements, charts and graphs – interrupted by living creatures such as snails. More than just a disruption, such living entities make evident the fleshy material basis of the abstract systems – snails, in particular, leave trails of chemical information in their slime, interpretable by those snails which follow after them (as well as easing their progress; a physical equivalent to the easing of the cognitive load by laid down intellectual pathways). Gansterer subjects works to re-evaluation, or commissions others to reinterpret his diagrams and symbols, enabling them to take on the shifts and variegation of complex and multifaceted language systems. They are intended to provide people with a relationship to the process of meaning-making rather than the making of specific meanings.

The text written by James Clegg.

HYPERGRAPHIA
Installation, 2018
presented at  CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

On my birthday in 2016, one of my friends brought me a notebook as a gift wishing me to write a new chapter in my life on its pages because of the difficult experience and stressful years I spent after leaving my home country. On one midnight time, I took the book and started to write only one sentence “I loved Vienna, but Vienna didn’t love me”. I felt this sentence is intensively saying it all, I was not able to stop writing it, it was like an overwhelming compulsion to write, a hypergraphic act and it was not the first time.

Writing is an act of healing. Both your immune system and mental health function strongly with this act. Sharing personal opinions and feelings with strangers might help them to cope with feelings of loneliness. Hypergraphia is a behavioural condition characterised by the intense desire to write or draw. Forms of hypergraphia can vary in writing style and content. It is the incurable writing disease. It wasn’t until the 20th century that scientists explored the brain chemistry behind this lust for language. In the 1970s, neurologists discovered that hypergraphia was often triggered by temporal lobe epilepsy. Scientists later linked it with bipolar disorder. Many writers suffered from Hypergraphia like Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, Dante and Moliere.

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
Two-channel video installation, 5’52’’
2015
presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019),Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes(2019), Helsinki

"The map is not the territory" metaphorically illustrates the differences between belief and reality. The phrase was coined by Alfred Korzybski. Our perception of the world is being generated by our brain and can be considered as a ‘map’ of reality written in neural patterns. Reality exists outside our mind, but we can construct models of this ‘territory’ based on what we glimpse through our senses.” This video on the two screens and the fragmented text is making a poetic journey in both parts of the brain and the state of mind-wandering where challenging the mind of the viewer in the way of seeing and using both parts of the brain to create his own neurological visual and linguistic mapping based on his experience on looking and perceiving the work, where everyone’s mind is unique in his way of seeing.

ALIEN PALACE BIRDHOUSE COLLECTION
2010-2018
Photographs and documentation
presented at  CrossSections_potentials (2019), Vienna

"Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection" consists of birdhouses that are modelled after detention centres for immigrants in different European countries. Detention centres are places where illegal immigrants, such as paperless refugees are held waiting for deportation or processing of their asylum application. Detention centres are essentially prisons, although only a small minority of their residents have a criminal record.

"Alien Palace" birdhouses provide excellent nesting conditions for the occasional winged visitor. The birdhouses are made of weatherproof and durable materials such as cement fibreboard, aluminium, brick and stainless steel.

THE BIRDSONG INITIATIVE
Mixed media, 2018
presented at  CrossSections_intervals (2018), Vienna

Austria plans to cut benefits for immigrants, including refugees, who do not speak German. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz intends to cap refugees’ benefits receive at €563 a month. They will only be able to claim the amount given to Austrians – €863 – if they successfully pass a German test, he said.“The fundamental rule we will introduce is that German will become the key to accessing the full minimum benefit,” Kurz said.“That means that whoever has insufficient language skills will not be able to claim the full minimum benefit.”

"The Birdsong Initiative" seeks to establish language restrictions on migratory birds entering Austria. It aims to build special learning facilities on the national borders where various migratory birds will be required to learn the song of the Austrian national bird, barn swallow, in order to enter the country.The initiative will be delivered to the Austrian government in the form of a Citizens’ Initiative once the minimum amount of 500 signatures has been gathered.

An installation in Kunshalle Exnergasse displays some prototype details of a birdsong learning facility, with audible songs of barn swallows. The Citizens’ Initiative form will be on display and the audience have a chance to add their signature.

INIZIATIVA CANTO D’UCCELLO/BIRDSONG INITIATIVE
Video, 8’45’’
2019
presented at CrossSections_perspectives (2019), Stockholm; and CrossSections_notes (2019), Helsinki

The video, shot on Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Italy, depicts a campaign speech for a citizens’ initiative suggesting strict language restrictions for migratory birds. To receive a residence permit, each bird entering the country must learn the song of the national bird, Italian sparrow. By happily confusing migratory birds with immigrants, the work takes on language as a building block of national identity as well as a means of inclusion and exclusion.