On their journey through the galaxy in their space ship Atana, the commander Ellen Ripley and her female crew are finally targeting the floating Venus City. Like bubbles the transparent gas balloons rhythmically glide up and down on the cloudy fog. These silky microworlds called HAVOC (high altitude venus operational concept) describe a still hypothetic but nonetheless feasible project by NASA to inhabit the atmosphere of the orange planet due to its earth-like physical properties.
Inaugurated with “A disturbance traveling through a medium“ at Duve Galerie in Berlin in September this year, Marianne Vlaschits’ “Venus City” at Kevin Space sequels the astronauts’ journey and exploration of new models of thinking and living together. An airy spatial installation of 18 meters of silk descends from above onto a layer of fog. The diversely shaped and coloured HAVOC airships originate both from baroque ceramics and futuristic computer game designs and not unintentionally resonate similarities with body parts and organs. Placed on a digitally generated, realistic background of clouds, they are printed on the delicate and almost transparent fabric in a
CGI simulating process. Embedded in the exaggerated gold sky colours and enfolded by mystic calls of sirens, in “Venus City”, image and space blur into a play between dream-like fiction and concrete bodily experience.
As lustful and exuberant materializations, overcast by the tangy taste of apocalyptic decadence, this manifestation of “Venus City” adheres an invitation to re-examine the borderlines between utopia and vision. To be certain – these are not simply castles built in the air. The realisation of this NASA research project describes a certain urgency to find new habitats for the human species due to the assumed inhabitability of planet earth caused by climate change. This in mind, the attempted dissolution of image and space, fiction and realism, disorientating changes of perspective, and humorous play of references and means of representation (such as male connoted pragmatic massive land art and CGI or ostensively female sensuality, seduction and silk painting), test out an imagined as well as
situated break with handed down truths.
Marianne Vlaschits with this cosmos creates an alternative script to visions of the future, in which a feminist one is either frightening or inconceivable. “Venus City” wants to remind us that, if the doom of a patriarchal world order seems more dystopic than the doom of mankind itself, the images that we can sense of the future draw the limits of our political imagination.
Marianne Vlaschits was born in Vienna in 1983. From 2005 to 2010 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with professor Gunter Damisch. Most recent exhibitions include "A disturbance traveling through a medium", Duve Gallery Berlin, 2015, "Welcome to the Jungle", Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2015 (group show), "Panama", One Work Gallery, Vienna, 2015, "Large Feet", La Musery, Vienna, 2015, "Pas de Deux", (with Marc-Alexandre-Dumoulin), Nile Sunset Annex, Cairo, 2014, and "Praxis der Liebe", Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, 2013 (group show). Vlaschits lives an
Sound by Rana Faharani
