Angelika Wischermann

Angelika Wischermann’s traces
supported by Bildrecht

Angelika Wischermann’s works and poetic settings create reflective spaces in which she performatively explores relationships between humans, bodies, and the environment. She gives the works in the exhibition titles such as Einschnitte (cutting), Ausgelöffelt (scooped) or Durchgekaut (chewed over) to illustrate their active, processual qualities. They refer to everyday objects like worn chopping boards, rubbed off silver spoons, or chewed gum stuck to the underside of a table and chair. They all bear traces of the artist’s vigorous actions and durational performances. Her movements respond to the properties of the material and the function of the objects. “Obsessive” artistic actions like these require discipline and endurance: time and repetition are primary tools.

Thus, the work is less concerned with the imprinting of the artist’s body as evidence of her presence than with the traces of a consciously initiated transformational process. Wischermann’s actions have no formal intention, no predetermined aesthetic to extract from the material. Individual artistic expression is secondary to the objects, which bear witness to their own “fabrication” and the physical processes that have led to their form.

The piece Bleiglanz (lead glance) presents a processual work that grows over the duration of the exhibition. Every week the artist selects a stone out in nature and draws on it with a pencil, applying a thin layer of graphite. The stones themselves remain in their natural environment and the process is documented through the collected pencil shavings, presented in jars like geological artifacts, with a new specimen added every week. Graphite has been inextricably linked to the cultural technique of writing for thousands of years, and the word itself derives from the ancient Greek γράφειν (graphein) meaning to write or draw. Graphite is extracted through mining and processed industrially. Wischermann returns the material to nature by “writing” back onto the stones.

We can interpret Angelika Wischermann’s site-specific interventions and performative actions as embodied artistic research that seeks to establish a relationship with specific objects, both geologically and industrially produced. In the spirit of “New Materialism”, the artist regards things as protagonists that likewise influence us and inscribe themselves into our human bodies. We could even describe this as an artistic “exploring [of] common worlds”^[1]. Wischermann invites us to reflect on our own presence and the traces that we leave behind in our environment. The material she applies or extracts represents human intervention and visualises interaction on a micro level. There is also an analogy here with mining, which links so closely to the history of the silver city of Schwaz, where nature, culture, and technology are irreversibly intertwined. Long after the cessation of silver mining, the landscape still carries visible traces of human impact, and this history continues to shape the local culture.

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[1] Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences intoDemocracy, 2004, p. 184.

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Text: Georgia Holz
Translation: Signe Rose

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Images © Aslan Kudrnofsky