Johannes Porsch

About:

Johannes Porsch’s artistic practice explores the formats “exhibition” and “publication” as post-media configuration of contemporary art. He investigates mnemonic aspects of the reciprocity of exhibiting and disseminating in respect to today’s visual industries and their attention- and symbolic economies. Indeed, the complex “exhibition-publication” prominently manifests these current conditions and problematics of semiocapitalism. Methodologically his approach refers to practices of post minimal and post conceptual art, more precisely to institutional critique and performative conceptions of subjectivity.

The post-media linking of “exhibition” and “publication” suggests a practice within the genre of installation art. A strategical bending of design operates as the conceptual framework of his artistic practice: if design yields and engenders social conditions through lending programmatically specific material qualities—meaning—to objects, spaces, language, then design also promises to render visible and intelligible these social conditions and subsequently the impact of inherent power conditions on respective practices/agencies and vice versa. Turning design into an aesthetic operation it problematizes, and genealogically reads the world we live in through the significant traces of its production. The sediments of such a reading produces archival layers and therefore act as mnemonic devices.

The residency is supported by Bundeskanzleramt Österreich and Österreichische Kulturforum Prag