‘Instructions for Happiness’
Anna-Sophie Berger, Keren Cytter, Heinrich Dunst, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Christian Falsnaes, Barbara Kapusta, Rallou Panagiotou, Angelo Plessas, Maruša Sagadin, Hans Schabus, Socratis Socratous, Jannis Varelas, Salvatore Viviano, Anna Witt; curated by Severin Dünser and Olympia Tzortzi
21er Haus, Vienna
8 July – 5 November 2017
Happiness is a fundamental human emotion, and every single one of us strives to achieve it in one form or other. This individual pursuit of happiness also forms the cornerstone of this exhibition, but instructions for happiness? Happiness is a very personal thing, and so it seems—quite frankly—absurd to promise that we can get closer to it simply by following a series of instructions. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, this exhibition attempts to approach the phenomenon of happiness from a variety of different perspectives.
Since the dawn of history, humans have sought to discover what it is that makes them happy and at what point they can truly be called a happy person. Although today we have access to a wealth of self-help literature on this very topic, instructions for happiness have existed since antiquity, albeit in a more philosophical form. According to Plato, happiness was to be found in maintaining the balance between the three parts of the soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—and preventing them from coming into conflict with one another. Aristotle saw a fundamental link between happiness and self-fulfillment, as when you do what you set out to do well, you gain a place in society and, at the same time, contribute to its betterment. As far as Epicurus was concerned, an individual’s happiness hinged on strategic abstinence: an individual could gain greater happiness by pursuing their pleasures, taking care not to numb their senses by pursuing desires that exceeded their basic needs. One of these pleasures was the cultivation of interpersonal relationships. ‘Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for’ is one piece of life advice offered by Epicurus. ‘Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb,’ advised Pythagoras, who was also quoted as saying: ‘The more our minds understand, the greater the blessings received.’
According to the old proverb, ‘every man is the architect of his own fortune.’ We all have a different concept of happiness, and since we each have our own individual needs, the fulfillment of these needs must necessarily be taken into our own hands. Regardless of whether fulfillment is sought in human relationships, the immediate, everyday life, or the beauty of small things, this exhibition seeks to challenge notions of happiness.
Anna-Sophie Berger’s piece, for instance, invites us to build a house of cards and knock it down again; to work with care and precision towards a specific goal and retain the freedom to leave behind the fruit of our labors at the end. In Keren Cytter’s video installation, visitors reflect themselves on the surface of a screen while watching a story of a family, a lover, a beach house, and a lonely boy, and are drawn into a meditative state by a soothing voice. Heinrich Dunst, meanwhile, raises questions about status. The phrase ‘Nicht Worte’ (Not Words) has been written on a page but has then been scored out; ‘Dinge’ (Things) has been written underneath. Is this a double negative, thus meaning words and things? Beneath this image lies a doormat featuring a Piet Mondrian design: it remains unclear, however, whether this mat is anything more than a thing or whether it instead constitutes an image-like thing or a thing-like replication of an image. The photo by Simon Dybbroe Møller shows a hug between a cook and a plumber. Is this a photo about interpersonal needs? It is, if anything, a representation of physical needs, consumption and digestion, the ‘basics’, so to speak. Christian Falsnaes’s sound installation instructs visitors to interact with one another through simple actions that obviously bring pleasure by playfully transgressing social conventions. Barbara Kapusta, meanwhile, invites visitors to make cups and bowls from modeling clay, to use their own bodies in the molding of drinking vessels that will satisfy basic needs. Rallou Panagiotou combines impersonal suitcases with replicas of things associated with happy memories, such as a pair of sandals lost on a beach in the 1990s and a mask—presumably of Medusa—that once hung on the wall of her grandmother’s summer house. Under the motto ‘Sharing is caring’, Angelo Plessas offers us a USB stick with files that can be transferred onto our own devices. These files seem to cover every one of life’s eventualities and include self-help books, music for meditation, and advice on love and spirituality. Jannis Varelas, on the other hand, instructs us to leave the exhibition space and go for a walk around the city. As we walk, he asks us to think about whether or not we want to go back and turn our attention once more to art. Salvatore Viviano asks us to ask ourselves how lonely we feel while listening to Elvis Presley laughing as he sings ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ Maruša Sagadin’s sculpture collection invites us to reflect on life in public space. On the one hand, she scrutinizes the opportunities for regeneration in urban spaces and on the other, the function of make-up and the formulaic conventions associated with it and representations of the self: if lipstick is a building, does that mean my face is a façade? A different question is asked by Hans Schabus and his sculpture: if good luck is a birdie, does that mean it is fleeting? And if that is the case, wouldn’t it be better to build a house for it? Socratis Socratous’s sculptures also deal with forms of flight and refuge. Small islands and bollards, made partially from smelted-down munitions from the world’s conflict zones, symbolize landing sites. The work focuses on migration over the seas and the safe havens that migrants hope to reach. Finally, Anna Witt’s video installation shows a group of people smiling for sixty minutes. Revolving around the commercialization of emotions and the sale of our own feelings, her video becomes a form of endurance test.
With their artworks, the artists shown in this exhibition ask us to follow instructions, respond to constructed situations, use objects to engage with others, or think about a particular theme. The different perspectives on show, in terms of both form and content, reflect the diversity of the artists’s own perspectives on happiness and those of society in general.
Walter Benjamin once wrote: ‘To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.’ In this spirit, we invite you to interact freely with the artworks on display and to use this experience as a chance to reflect on the phenomenon of happiness. One’s own fulfillment is, after all, intrinsically linked to reflecting on one’s own needs and actions, which in turn leads to a conscious, self-determined life and mastery of the ars vivendi, the art of living. For as the sociologist Gerhard Schulze once said: ‘What does one live for, if not for the beautiful life?’
Exhibition catalogue:
Instructions for Happiness
Edited by Stella Rollig, Severin Dünser and Olympia Tzortzi
Including texts by Anna Sophie Berger, Keren Cytter, Severin Dünser & Olympia Tzortzi, Heinrich Dunst, Simon Dybbroe Møller & Post Brothers, Christian Falsnaes, Barbara Kapusta, Rallou Panagiotou, Angelo Plessas, Stella Rollig, Maruša Sagadin, Hans Schabus, Socratis Socratous, Jannis Varelas, Salvatore Viviano and Anna Witt
Graphic design by Alexander Nußbaumer
Photos by Thomas Albdorf
German/English
Hardcover, 22.5 × 16 cm, 128 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2017
ISBN 978-3-903114-41-8
Anna-Sophie Berger
‘let rise, let go’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
6 — 30 November 2014
Upon entering Anna-Sophie Berger’s show at the 21er Raum, one encounters a distinctive scent of freshly baked bread. Bread as a basis for nutrition is synonymous with our existential needs. The “daily bread” can be seen as a symbol of the emergence of human culture, of the simple procedure and recipe that includes the baking of material as the basis of human production, which is expressed through its various religious and social connotations.
Anna-Sophie Berger uses whole-grain bread sculptures as manifestations of deceleration and negotiates degrees of cultural fragmentation and uprooting: with hardly more than a week spent at the same place, the contemporary artist’s daily routines can hardly be defined by geographic characteristics. The baking of bread, together with the everyday life of the artist’s mother as a counterpart to that of a digital native fathoms ideas of home and belonging, questions for stable elements that depend on a predefined structure as, for example, a list of ingredients.
In the present case, baking bread can be seen here as sculptural production, even though the outcome is ephemeral. The bread loaves are not processed for conservation, but are, on the contrary, hardening during the course of the exhibition to be finally shredded and fed to animals, by which the cycle is closed.
Bread and its organic lability are representative of a material reality that contrasts the textile panels and their respective motifs. Digital photographs are printed on various polyester fabrics whose textile structure imitates such natural textiles as silk or cotton. The images have been selected from a multitude of snapshots taken compulsively with a mobile phone camera – fragments of Anna-Sophie Berger’s everyday life. She describes the pictures as “visual illustration of an incessant thought process”, and the panels “as an attempt to probe the relation between material and information”.
The panels are up to 65 feet long, each confined to a single image repeating itself and referring ever again to the difference between digital and physical quantity. The pixelated grain of the enlarged photographic material formally makes for a poetic effect, suggesting closeness while romanticizing rather than documenting a situation. Depicted are a chess piece from the Medieval Collection of the Cloisters Museum in New York, gems from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, a molecular cooking dish, eggshells, and a broken salad plate – intact and fragmented objects of a very distinct physical materiality and texture – cultural artifacts and food. Digitally processed before having been printed, they are already artificial representations of natural surface qualities. The juxtaposition mirrors the perception of a specific space that Berger inhabits as an artist tourist, oscillating between cultural reception, artistic agent, and the daily commodity of nutrition regardless of place and context.
Both groups are charged with contemporary doubts about cultural affiliation, internationality, identity, location of self, geopolitics, and ethical goals – emphasized by the text collages on the glass works. Notes taken simultaneously in time and space complete the inner discourse. As fragments of thoughts they indicate a certain conflict, a persistent hovering between options.
What are we to eat if emotions and individual socialization define our consumption just as much as ecological and ethical reflections should, whilst keeping in mind financial reality? How can our needs be sustainably satisfied and what can we feel responsible for? What could be the balance between life and its virtual representation?
Berger’s exhibition in the 21er Raum reflects on the complex relation between social needs, political responsibility and economic reality. A desire for certain things seems to override the capacity to judge one’s own decisions sufficiently. The impossibility to do the one right thing is reflected in an interplay between yielding and resisting, warm and cold – silk and cotton. Her works try to fathom a balance between the immateriality of a digital world and a still-physical human existence, in the end negotiating material itself. What is the form and texture of an image? Objects of both symbolic and emotional value within a loop of material representations is what Anna-Sophie Berger leaves you with: A confusion by relating the self to a changing world where effigy and objects tend to be more and more indistinguishable.
Anna-Sophie Berger’s work negotiates specific characteristics of material and production while reflecting upon the context of objects and their distribution. Her work probes the boundaries of disciplines and their fluent transitions in order to reach a critical understanding of individual motivations and feelings. She is interested in the daily tension between physical reality, sensual needs of a social being, and an increasingly digital perception of life.
Anna-Sophie Berger was born in Vienna, where she lives and works, in 1989. Her work has recently been shown at Mauve (Vienna), JTT (New York), Mathew (Berlin), Suzanne Geiss Company (New York), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), and Clearing (Brussels).
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0