Artnews.org: Charim Vienna

Places to Recall

by Oona Lochner

We all act, according to the findings made in 1959 by the social theorist Erving Goffman. Life is a stage, and we know that we are being watched while we act out the different roles of the protagonists of our own invention. So, too, the figures in Kone's new drawings find themselves on the stage. They stand with trousers down and in front of silent prompter boxes, looking towards the faceless crowd that is their audience. Whereby the abyss of the stage pit is not only the borderline for the confrontation. Individual figures cross the threshold between the stage and the auditorium, and the audience itself provides a side-show in the galleries and boxes. While musicians from the orchestra pit flood onto the stage the audience in the stalls prepare for the accompanying performance, and their richly varied comedy replaces the polyphonics of the now silent instruments. The fourth wall of the stage space is transparent, also for the onlooker outside the image. For sometimes the onlooker looks down from the stage and sometimes she/he occupies the last row of the auditorium. Close behind a figure seen from the rear peering through the heavy curtain, she/he finds her/himself in an ambivalent place between in front of, on and behind the stage.
Following the Dyonisian cult the theatre retained in its curtain the function of the temple threshold. As a dialectic motif of separating connections the threshold mediates between two conflicting places. Following the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, Walter Benjamin calls the ceremonial crossing from one symbolic order into another "Rites de passage" or "threshold experiences".* This change of identities — along the line of the theatre curtain that runs between front and back, performance and audience, seeing and being seen. So the viewer finds her/himself caught up in a circular movement between focal points and the identities associated with them. The ambiguity of this role is continued in the sculptural extension of the stage space in the drawing, too. A screen taller than a man stands in the exhibition space as abbreviated theatre architecture on which the viewer sees a schematic audience. However their faces are negative forms carved in wood so that the aspects of confrontation and permeability overlap. Through the faceless heads stepping out of the drawing, the viewers themselves become voyeuristic actors encircling one another.
Like other objects by Kone, for instance the Alpha-Omega table, the motif for the screen stems from the formal vocabulary of drawing. Its three parts conform to the triptych drawings, the most recent of which conveys the connection between cultic threshold transgressions and theatrical role confusion. Here, too, the scene plays above all in the audience, behind the curtains of the boxes arranged in a semicircle, which transition into the shape of a temple as miniature stage architecture in the left panel of the drawing. On the stage, however, before the empty stalls, the last protagonist screws his role from his throat and leaves it in the company of other bodiless characters wandering around. Even though left behind by the actors as masks, in their mobile plasticity they ripen into independent figures, stepping as these out of the drawing and lining up in the temple-theatre architecture of the etagere (house of heads).
A place to recall, a place, then, that serves to confirm one's own role, is the stage as much as it is the drawing and the exhibition for Moussa Kone. Both become permeable as a threshold between the artist and the audience, permitting the viewer to participate in the experience of simultaneously playing themselves while viewing.

* Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Mass. & London 2002

Moussa Kone

1978 born in Scheibs, Austria

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Education

1999-2003
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Fine Arts Department

Grants

2009
Austrian State Grant for Fine Arts, Strabag Art Award, Reznikov Award

Solo Exhibitions

2010
"places to recall", Charim Galerie, Vienna
"en pointe (switch legs, left up, around, and reach)", Strabag Artforum, Vienna, Austria

2009
"nocturne (pieces of silence)", Charim Ungar Contemporary, Berlin

Group Exhibitions

2005
"hotspots - Emerging Artists", Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria
"Anton Faistauer Preis 2005", Galerie im Traklhaus, Salzburg, Austria

2006
"Der gestohlene Blick", Sonderschau, Cologne Fine Art Fair, Cologne, Germany
"Wiener Blut", Kunstraum 21, Cologne, Germany
"Economy Class", Alliance Francaise, Nairobi, Kenia
"FAUNA://hybrid", Charim Galerie, Vienna, Austria, curated by Lioba Reddeker
"Eau de Cologne", Werftgalerie, Vienna, Austria
"Dies ist doch kein Porno", Galerie Lisi Haemmerle, Bregenz, Austria
"Potential Dialogue. Facts and Fiction", RCM Museum, Nanjing, China, curated by Christiane Krejs, Kunstraum Noe

2007
"ARTmART", Kuenstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria, curated by Lorenz Seidler
"Ship of Fools", Kunstpavillon Innsbruck, Austria
"Zeichen und Zeichnung", Charim Galerie, Vienna, Austria
"Is it a High C or a Vitamin B", Galerie 5020, Salzburg, Austria, curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

2008
"Plateau", Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria, curated by Eva Martischnig
"resetting/phantasana (curtain falls)", Thomas K. Lang Gallery, Webster University, Vienna, Austria
"resetting/phantasana (curtain rises)", Charim Galerie, Vienna, Austria

2009
"New Positions", Art Cologne, Cologne, Germany
"Get Connected - Reznikov Collection & Award", Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria
Viennafair, Vienna, Austria
"Strabag Art Award Exhibition", Strabag Art Lounge, Vienna, Austria
"Chili con Carne", Forum Frohner, Krems, Austria
"Kardinal König Kunstpreis", Kunstraum St.Virgil, Salzburg, Austria
"Kopfstücke", Galerie Punkt Z, Hard, Austria

2010
"Heroes of today", Red Gate Gallery Studios, Beijing, China
"Wo Ich war soll Es werden", Element 6, Vienna, Austria
"Fine line", Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria
"Helden von Heute", Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria
"rumours form groundcontrol (3C75)", Galerie Punkt Z, Hard, Austria
"originalfunktional", Wiener Art Foundation, Vienna, Austria, curated by Stefan Bidner
"silent narrative", stadtgalerie schwaz, Austria
"Stift und Zettel", Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany

2011
"The Borders of Drawing", Kunstverein das weisse Haus, Vienna, Austria
"Silent Narrative", Galerie im Traklhaus, Salzburg, Austria

Projects

since 2004 Co-Founder and organisation of the Artist Association Kunstwerft, more infos on www.kunstwerft.com

2004-2006 Organisation of the Werftgalerie - Artist-Run-Space in Vienna, more infos on www.werftgalerie.at

2004-2007 Kunstklappe©, public space, Vienna, Austria and Cologne, Germany

2006-2009 Art Critics Award, more infos on www.artcriticsaward.com

2007 Missing: Discourse, opera-libretto, more infos on www.missingdiscourse.com

Bibliography

Regl, Bianca; Muntean, Robert (Ed.): Heroes of today. Kerber Artbooks, Leipzig, 2010.
Kunsthalle Wien (Ed.): Wem gehört die Stadt? Wien - Kunst im öffentlichen Raum seit 1968. Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2009.
Strabag Art Foundation (Ed.): Strabag Art Award International, Vienna, 2009.
K wie Kunst. Kardinal-König-Kunstpreis Salzburg 2009. Müry Salzmann Verlag, Salzburg-Wien, 2009.
Quart. Heft für Kultur in Tirol Nr.14/2009.
Reddeker, Lioba (Ed.): Art Critics Award Lesebuch. basis wien, 2007.
Schor, Gabriele (Ed.): Held together with water. Kunst aus der Sammlung Verbund. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007.
Krejs, Christiane; Jing, Zuo (Ed.): "Potential Dialogue". RCM Art Museum Beijing, 2006.
Edition Sammlung Essl: "hot spots". Klosterneuburg, 2005.

Links

www.moussakone.com

www.charimgalerie.at