So let me share the cooking instructions with you: The shiny yellow alu sheets are Signicolor by Novelis. The bright-coloured heavy-duty duct tape is Pattex by Henkel. And the words and the composition are genuine Lena Lapschina.
I’ve built a fully fledged tranquil fantasyland of endless gadgetry and enjoyment into the catacombs of a defunct flagship building of the municipal housing company of the city of Vienna, Austria. A commission by the Soho-in-Ottakring foundation for the 2016 edition of their biennial art festival, the piece comprises a three-channel video installation with sound, myriads of smartlife equipment, organic food, all sorts of drinkable liquids, and a considerable amount of interior design craftwomanship.
People entering the “Smacoo!!” installation – the title is a blend of the words smart and cooking – barely found out if they had immersed into a video program, or into the land of free milk and honey, or into a smart laboratory of the future, or into a modern version of Pieter Breughel’s “Luilekkerland”.
All things were interwoven with each other, and while some visitors just fell into trance by watching a looped version of my film “Another ordinary pre-view day at Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte”, others settled on the large sofa where they could screen the one-hour runtime video “The influence of alcoholic drinks on the social intercourse of the intelligentsija”, while their children quickly found out about the super organic meals and dairy everywhere in the room (and also about the trampoline-like qualities of the sofa suite).
Another group of participants seemed to be waiting in front of an apparent oven for the lasagne to be ready and served, although that moment never happened – “Lasagne TV”, an extra-short loop of seventeen seconds on the tiny kitchen-class flat screen.
A series of private-style events poored beautiful people into the installation, and besides all the food processing and cooking, the cool drinks and the hot discussions, there was also time for intense quantify-yourself-activities and video-surveillance aka film-shooting. Results? Soon!
During Vienna Art Week, I had a mini-show in a twelve-room apartment aka the Viennese studio. Old friends, like my neon sign “Girls wanted”, the pizza-boxed video series “17 Sekunden Kunst”, the Wittmann-manufactured cushions “Art-Free Territory” and the Mercedes-Benz tribute photo series “Communication”, joined forces with brand new stuff, like the installation “Curators’ Water”, the light-boxed photo series “Some things that long time do not exist” (Duratrans, light-box, crank), the xerography-inspired, Teheran-produced work “Role Models” (edition: 1), the photographed alphabet “Trees and poets, citified” (Dibond) and the post-future of painting series “Stuff”. Visitors also got a chance to preview the video series “Message to the World” while hanging out at the bar, and to engage in the participatory media installation “Get Fit With Dr. Lapschina”.
N.B.: “Thank you” to everyone who made this exhib possible, and especially to Mario Codognato for more than an hour of questions and answers.
Wanna see my marvellous studio? Well, there has never been a better opportunity than on November 22. Mario Codognato and I will exchange ideas during an open talk at 4 pm. 1-click-iCal here. Navi here. (For those without a navi: Guglgasse 15, Level 4. Métro: U3 Gasometer.) Bread and butter. Joya Cappuccino and … much more! And even goodie bags!
A Viennese off-space, basically a shopfront composed of eighteen identical shop windows, is home to my latest media work of art. With “Propaganda”, I’m showing honour and reverence for the city’s great past in shop architecture.
The installation indeed is begging for the attention of passers-by, like any good window-dressing – but purely to bewilder them. Thanks to 5832 LED lamps switched at a speed of 30 cycles per second, I put visitors into a trance-like state, leave them in this state for a minute, and then slowly start to enlighten them as to what this is. The word “PROPAGANDA” appears, in glowing capital letters. And a confession: “LENA LAPSCHINA”. Smoke. Loop.
On view every day through Feb. 28th from dusk to midnight.
Note to conservators: This media installation uses 18 off-the-shelf Cielos Move LED panels, 5 Video Control Units, approx. 100 m of Ethernet wire, and a portion of Zumtobel-proprietary software.
“Propaganda”: 25 metres of shop window present the media installation to passers-by.
It apparently arrived from outer space. “Destination reached,” a monitor is breathing monotonously. It’s unclear if the message ever will be decoded.
A new piece – actually a three-channel video installation with sound.
“Ziel erreicht”
media installation
2013
[exhibition view, Kunsthalle Exnergasse at the WUK, Vienna]
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