VIENNA - Belvedere 21 presents Maria Hahnenkamp’s first major institutional solo exhibition: a remarkable Austrian artist who, with radical consistency and subtle subversion, confronts the mechanisms of accelerated and superficial image production and opens up new perspectives on seeing and thinking.
Stella Rollig, general director of the Belvedere: Maria Hahnenkamp’s oeuvre is among the most interesting and most headstrong in recent Austrian art history. For decades, this artist has systematically interrogated social and media structures and analyzed images of femininity with subversive radicalism, and the time has come to introduce her to a wider audience.
For over thirty years, Hahnenkamp has been working with, through, on, and even against the medium of photography and its specific dispositives. In her critical, feminist practice, she deliberately undermines the voyeurism of the media, rejects the passive consumability of images, and offers alternative perspectives on bodies, space, and social norms.
As an artist’s artist, Hahnenkamp is well known for her media-critical and feminist practice and is a key figure in contemporary Austrian art. In the 1980s, she taught herself the craft of photography through commercial art and gained experience in print shops and advertising agencies; at the same time, she began to interrogate and disrupt the image strategies she encountered. At the beginning of the 1990s, Hahnenkamp attended Friedl Kubelka-Bondy’s School for Artistic Photography, where she took part in workshops on experimental and artistic photography. It was around this time that she began to date her first artistic works. Hahnenkamp describes this period as follows: “Graphic design by day and art by night.”
Hahnenkamp’s oeuvre includes photographs, works with photographic paper, slide projections, video works, installations, and site-specific interventions. She deliberately describes herself as an artist who works with photography—not a photographer. Her works emerge from the interplay between appropriation, deconstruction, and critical reflection on photographic materials. By withdrawing from the camera herself, instead only directing her subjects and compositions and reflecting on them as an artist, she distances herself from the supposedly objective gaze of photography.
Her interest lies in the staging of the female body in the context of consumer-driven image production. To resist this form of appropriation, she develops artistic strategies of withdrawal: women’s bodies are fragmented, veiled, or erased—a deliberate counterapproach to conventional mechanisms of representation. At the same time, she draws on forms of excess: by using found image material, which is cast onto the wall in rapid succession as a slide projection, she illustrates the continuously increasing flood of images.
As a result of her daily confrontation with advertising images, Hahnenkamp soon identified photography as a medium of appropriation and commercial superficiality. In her art, she challenges the photographic image, undermining its conventions and unveiling what is hidden behind the visible.
While her works contain references to the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s, she has developed a unique artistic approach that has forged new paths for a younger generation of artists. She uses the intersections between commercial and artistic photography as a productive and critical filter—both for her works and her exhibition concepts.
With more than one hundred works from around thirty-five work groups, the exhibition at Belvedere 21 offers a comprehensive insight into Maria Hahnenkamp’s multifaceted oeuvre. Central themes are emptiness, space, craft, and ornament. Developed together with the artist in the exhibition architecture designed by Walter Kräutler, the presentation includes photographs, works on photographic paper, slide projections, video works, installations, site-specific interventions, and a sound work.
Curator Stefanie Reisinger: This exhibition was created in close collaboration with Maria Hahnenkamp. It was important to us to make her work visible and tangible by focusing on her main interests and artistic strategies. The principle of reduction, the minimal targeted architectural interventions, and the deliberate empty spaces create room for attentive contemplation that goes beyond mere looking. Her theoretical and conceptual approach thus establishes itself in a surprisingly perceptive and tactile way. Visitors can expect an enthralling array of stimulating contrasts.
A catalog published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König will accompany the exhibition. Texts by Clara Bouveresse, Rainer Fuchs, Ruth Horak, Christin Müller and Stefanie Reisinger examine Maria Hahnenkamp's work from an art historical, feminist and media-theoretical perspective.
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