Exhibition, Cache. Feministische Ästhetiken und Archivprozesse

08.11.24 bis 12.01.25 Lentos Linz 2024/2025

Important starting points in Anne Glassner's artistic work are questions about the relationship between staging and reality. Her interest in dreams, states of consciousness and the interactions between body and space find expression in her works. The media used include photographs, drawings, videos and performance, and a central theme of Glassner's work is the archiving of performance art. She poses questions such as: How can an archive be opened up artistically? What survives from a performance? How is it documented and presented? Can an archive keep performances alive? In the course of her scholarship, Anne Glassner explored alternative forms of archiving. 

As part of a live performance at the opening evening of the exhibition “Cache-Feminist Aesthetics and Archival Processes”, Anne Glassner takes up VALIE EXPORT's “Body Configurations” (1972-1982), among other things, and presents her perspectives. The VALIE EXPORT Center, founded in 2017, inspired Glassner to create a photo series that can be seen in the exhibition: wearing a turquoise jumpsuit sewn by her grandmother and alluding to her great-grandmother, who was a self-confident tobacco worker, she explores the architecture of the premises and also seeks out places where EXPORT's works were created in order to approach them in a lying position. On the one hand, her pose is about a counter-attitude to the mainstream of accelerated growth (male-dominated belief in progress, which is possibly also adopted by women), but also about a pause, a body awareness from which new perspectives can emerge. Several strands become visible: it is about class consciousness, production/growth versus stagnation.

Turquoise cushions, relics of a collective sleep performance, are reminiscent of the overnight stay with a school class in the offices of the archive, during which the return of production and work was discussed. The turquoise banner “Expanding” with her sleeping, vulnerable body position only becomes visible when you look through the window from the interior of the Lentos to the art university. The color is reminiscent of the architecture in the tobacco factory and runs through Glassner's installation from Linz to Vienna and back again.

The blanket installed in the room shows a new way of making her archive of thoughts accessible. Internal processes are turned inside out, communicated to the outside. “The blanket absorbs my traces, a physical process, an inhalation of VALIE EXPORT's trains of thought, a continuation of thinking. A memory of my own thought process”.

photos: Violetta Walkolbinger

https://www.valieexportcenter.at/c-a-c-h-e-feministische-aesthetiken-und-archivprozesse#c2875

https://www.lentos.at/ausstellungen/cache