Birgit Schlieps

Trancemoderne

In an examination of the city, architecture and living, the city becomes a sculptural material that Birgit Schlieps translates and transforms into different media. The artist works with photography, video, drawing, texts and objects that phenomenologically and conceptually represent the relationship between architecture and landscape as immediately dependent upon social conditions.

Birgit Schlieps writes: “The site of the artistic work is the urban space as a phantom, myth and construction. Within this context, I attempted to find locations and landscapes that minimize the clearly-interpretable representational content of architecture, to infect them with an unnatural artificiality and thereby make a more sensitive view of the space possible. The goal was to produce an imaginative field of various realities through which viewers can discover new versions of modernity for themselves. With Trancemodernity, I continued a work at Büchsenhausen that I have been researching through long-term observation over the years. I directly took up the topic of the production of images in connection with architecture. The concrete site was a former Soviet, modernist ideal city on the Kazakh Steppe by the Caspian Sea. The plan was to develop various spatial-visual constructions based on five locations within this city. It was a question of connecting found images and the world of imagination within these images to my own images, which, on the one hand, trace the remaining fragments of modernity and on the other hand, fragmentarily construct the image of the city today.”

Birgit Schlieps realized three performative lectures, discussions and a wall installation in Büchsenhausen (the latter as part of the Concluding Presentation). The artist also gave talks at the University of Innsbruck’s Department of Slavic Studies and Department for Architecture and Historic Preservation.