In Person & Carte Blanche: Josef Dabernig

Shortly after his 70th birthday, we celebrate Austrian artist Josef Dabernig with a complete retrospective of his films, expanded by a carte blanche and a glimpse into his work in other domains, including performance readings and slide projections. With their presence at festivals and in exhibition spaces, the total of 22 short films which Dabernig has made since the mid-1990s – a handful in collaboration with other artists – represent the most well-known part of his creative output, but they belong to a larger multimedia oeuvre, to which the subtitle of the first Dabernig monograph already referred: Film, Photo, Text, Object, Construction. Dabernig moved to Vienna in 1975 to study sculptural practice, and his moving image work expands this into "spatial sculpture." At the same time, for all their structural clarity, these are also fiction films in the literal sense: not purely abstract conceptual art, but instead tragicomic miniatures, using Dabernig's unmistakable laconicism to present situations full of absurd humor and melancholy, which are enriched by autobiographical references and explore aesthetic and private interests – from architecture to sweets. (Christoph Huber) ... more

A joint program between Österreichisches Filmmuseum, sixpackfilm and Collection Kontakt