monika wührer

Your Presence leads to conflict (however, there is little reason to think that your absence will lead to peace)

Galerie pro arte
October 2005, Austria

Front Room Gallery, By Artificial Resemblance, Banner Project
March 2005, NY, Williamsburg

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My Work always develops out of a sensible and playful aproach to my enviroment. This project with the title "Your presence leads to conflict (however, there is little reason to think that your absence will lead to peace.)" deals with politics and its influence and/or the other way round. It involves a boxingbag, a video with people performing to Bob Dylan's song "Masters of War" and a series of posters (pieces of one huge printout blown up from a tiny photograph, printed in bip map format and mounted on wood). I was invited to do a banner for the exhibition "By Artificial Resemblance: Portraits from Four Centuries", an exhibition of portraits from a variety of periods and styles. That's when I started the idea of the boxingbag, combined with the sentence that I find very interesting. How do politics, especially during their age of globalization effect the individual? The boxing bag, also called a heavy bag, is the unpersonified body, (dead or alive?). The sentence frightens the viewer, because nobody seeems to be able to win the fight!
Similar is the video, where in an intimate camouflage enviroment a very political theme gets discussed very personally.
The huge printout of the cowd in the end also focuses on the single personalities, rather than the hole protesting crowd itself.