strategy of action
Austrian Cultural Forum, London
curated by Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques
However, when artist collective mahony arrived fresh from Vienna, they slowly began to undo the very workings of this organisation. As soon as computers and copiers switched to standby at the end of business each day, they literally unpacked precious archival materials, dismantled furniture and shuffled the daily detritus that constitutes this 9 to 5 working environment.
Removing glasses from kitchen cupboards, books from library shelves, and beds from bedrooms, mahony rearranged these materials into temporary interventions, lasting only long enough to be photographed in the midnight hours, before returning them precisely to their ordinary positions before the 9am log-on.
As every corner of our public and professional lives becomes focused on efficiency and strategic achievements, mahony have filled their nights at the Austrian Cultural Forum with absurd plans. Producing painstaking documentation of every objective detail, and developing laborious systems of moving and returning, their work rebels against the IKEA generation that we have become, bringing life back to the objects we are so attached to, by allowing them out of the strict organisational systems we create.
These nocturnal processes, invisible to everyone but the four artists that are mahony, appearing to have no purpose with the same beginning and end, at least unsettle the dust and produce a pure strategy of action.
Text by Adriana Marques
http://www.austria.org.uk/culture/category/visual-arts-platform/event-archive/
saatchi-gallery
before - after: books
before - after: books
before - after: kitchen
before - after: kitchen