Screening

The Or Gallery and Charles H. Scott Gallery are pleased to present a screening of video works by Vienna-based artists Lisl Ponger and Tim Sharp. Ponger and Sharp are currently Artists-in-residence at the Or Gallery with the support of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.

Beginning at 7PM in the lecture hall of Emily Carr (SB 301), the program will be as follows:

Works by Tim Sharp:

• Traveller’s Tales (2003, 13 mins)
• The Trapdoor (2005, 26 mins)
• The Green Bag (2007, 7 mins)

[Intermission]

Works by Lisl Ponger
• Passages (1996, 12 mins)
• dejá vu (1999, 22 min)
• Phantom Foreign Vienna (2004, 27 mins)

Lisl Ponger has shown widely in Europe including recent solo shows at the CUC, Berlin, Kunsthaus Dresden, and Charim Galerie, in Vienna.

In ArtForum, March 2007, Bridgitte Huck summarizes Ponger’s work:

For the Dak’Art Biennial of Contemporary African Art 2004, Austrian artist Lisl Ponger hoped to photograph selections from the famous ethnographic collection of Dakar’s Musee d’Art Africain. As she waited for permission from the museum, she started a series of photographs in her hotel room; when the official okay never came, these works became her biennial contribution. Si j’avais eu l’autorisation … (If I Had Had Authorization …)—thus ran the project’s subjunctive title—then she wouldn’t have stayed in her room photographing props from her own personal archive of materials relating to the themes of colonialism, globalization, and travel. She grouped these items on the tile mosaic of the hotel floor according to classificatory patterns: ethnologist, painter, photographer, tourist. Although this was not the project that Ponger originally planned, it hews closely to her interests. Her politically motivated work continues to investigate issues of colonialism, ethnology, ideology, and constructions of identity.

A visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker, Ponger is equally at home at Documenta (she participated in 2002) and at film festivals. Acting (often in the same work) as director, set designer, performer, and archivist, she investigates the interfaces between art and science, between sociology, art history, and political activism, moving obliquely through these disciplines to create compositions of explosive power and precise observation. Ponger interrogates the resonances of non-Western art within Western modernism.

Tim Sharp’s work is concerned with the construction of historical and personal memory. In his photo work he deals with the relationship between image and text while his films explore the changing relationship of image to sound and the mutability of the documentary assertion made by lens-based images.

He has taken part in many international exhibitions and film festivals including Routes – Imaging Travel and Migration in the Grazer Kunstverein; Black Atlantic in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin as well as Shake in the OK Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz and Villa Arson, Nice. More recently he participated in TIEFENRAUSCH also at the OK Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz.

In 2005 and 2006 he took part in shows in the Kunsthalle Dresden where he will be showing new work in 2010 as part of the series of exhibitions Notes on the Empire.