Barbara Kapusta
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1983
Austria
Gianni Manhattan
"TIME HAS FELT LIKE BURNING
AND THERE IS NO END OF TIME
AND THE APOCALYPSE HAS NEVER STOPPED."
For Liste Showtime, GIANNI MANHATTAN is pleased to present "Futures", Barbara Kapusta’s first exhibition in Slovakia which took place at Kunsthalle Bratislava from May 6 - June 19, 2022 and was curated by Jen Kratochvil .
"Futures" addresses and freely maneuvers between various time-scapes, bringing generational lessons and experiences closer together, while at the same time directing their resonance into the potential of various futures.
Referencing moments of great turmoil in modern history and their echoes in the decades to come, it addresses a certain circularity of humanity’s repea ...
The one presented in the exhibition space “A Window” at Kunsthalle Bratislava is filled and guarded by the radiant presence of three Giants. Large scale aluminum cast sculptures giving the impression of a broken boundary between the physical and digital reality. While the Giants themselves stay silent, the story of Futures is narrated by a voiceover and parallel sound design, spreading through the exhibition space in a multi-channeled soundtrack. While the interior of the space is pulsing with almost meditative, gripping sounds, the exterior facade seems to be starting to burn and…"
…WORDS SPILL OUT AND SPREAD LIKE FLAMES
Barbara Kapusta (she, her) lives and works in Vienna. Her works are articulations of situated bodies, partial perspectives and queer agency as they question the imperial gesture of universality and binary structuring. Her latest immersive four-channel video installation Solar (2022) is a dystopian science fiction about the end of the fossil age as well as the dream of infinite resources. In it, giant techno-human figures roam the decaying landscape of a destructive past. Extractive neoliberal capitalism and the fossil fuel economy - once the backbone of the patriarchal household here - have led to its devastation. Solar raises the question of a different future. One based on a different economy, one that does not rely on resource-consuming exploitation.
Recent and upcoming exhibitions include WORDS DON’T GO THERE, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2023), The Palace of Concrete Poetry, Writers’ House, Tbilisi, (2022); Let your () do the talking, NAK Aachen (2022); Futures, Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022); Lo(l) – Embodied Language, Kunsthaus Hamburg (2022); Dissolving Matter & Value, Lothringer 13, Munich (2021); Enjoy, museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, Vienna (2021); Europa Antike Zukunft, Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz (2021); The Leaking Bodies Series, Gianni Manhattan Vienna (2020); Dangerous Bodies, Kunstraum London (2019), Hysterical Mining, Kunsthalle Wien (2019), Empathic Creatures at Ashley Berlin (2018).
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2020
1983
Austria
GIANNI MANHATTAN
Kapusta's most recent works are part of a wider investigation into the parallels between geographical borders and the permeability of skin. Kapusta considers skin as a zone of transition, a membrane, acting as simultaneously permeable and a barrier. A fertile zone where transformations, new compositions and multiplications occur, whilst at the same time contending with the constant and real threat of pollution, extinction and poisoning.
Barbara Kapusta, The Giant (2018), installation view Hysterical Mining, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); photo: Jorit Aust
In the work of Barbara Kapusta, sculpture, text, performance and animated video works blend together to investigate forms of metamorphosis. Ever changing, ever between states, her works recall the inherent potential of change in content, objects and beings interrogating materiality and collective becoming. Conscious of the place of the viewer, the artist navigates the in-between space of the individual and the collective, of dismemberment and amplification, fluidity and stasis, compilation and fiction - abolishing any strict categorical distinction. (Alexandra Goullier Lhomme, curator of Tongue on To ...
Barbara Kapusta (*1983, lives and works in Vienna)
Her objects, films and text-based works have been shown in, among others, Hypersurface, ACF London (2020), Dangerous Bodies, Kunstraum London (2019), Hysterical Mining, Kunsthalle Wien (2019), The Giant, Gianni Manhattan (Vienna 2018), Vice Versa: Our Earth is Their Moon, Our Moon is Their Earth (Prague 2018), Empathic Creatures at Ashley Berlin (2018), Instructions for Happiness (KUP, Athens 2016), and The Promise of Total Automation, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2016).
Her recent publication Dangerous Bodies was published in 2019 by Gianni Manhattan, Vienna & Motto Books, Lausanne, Berlin.
