pretty-pretty

In pretty-pretty, Kurdwin Ayub’s reflective self-staging meets Viennese Actionism, body horror coalesces with beauty and the pain that Ayub has so often staged, becomes physical for the first time. As she applies a fine needle making viewers’ nerves twitch, a bloody, radiant smile spreads across her face. (Diagonale 2020, die Unvollendete, Catalogue, mk)

Images of sublime beauty go hand-in-hand with their inverted doubles or undersides in this program – sometimes overtly, sometimes as a suggested shadow. In Viktoria Schmid’s A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE, images and sounds of a natural landscape in Lithuania are interwoven with a semi-transparent screen sculpture also in CinemaScope, a screen that is embedded in the same landscape. POMP by Katrina Daschner uses ironic, disquieting images of female dancers in formation to undermine a milieu of grand architecture and high life. Kurdwin Ayub’s PRETTY-PRETTY gives a short, nasty, feminist shock worthy of Cronenberg, while LOLOLOL is a naturalistic depiction of the bitchy banter of two typical young denizens of the art world attending Parallel Vienna that was shot on an iPhone X. Friedl vom Gröller compares three states of dancing (solitary, group, and camera-dancing) in ELITE. Cana Bilir-Meier builds a bridge between the theatre scene of Munich in 1982 and that of the present as way of exploring racism. (Viennale 2021, Adrian Martin)