Archive: H13 2016: ANDREA MAURER
Duration: 02 09 - 03 09 2016
Performance und prize presentation 01 09 2016:
5pm - 9pm Durational Performance
7pm Prize presentation
until 9pm Live-Act N.O.W., DJ-Set Andrea Salzmann
The winner of the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance is unanimous: Andrea Maurer’s performance “Selbstzerlegung” [Self-Deconstruction] thoroughly convinced the H13 jury with its “consistent experimental approach to language, generated from an interplay between construction and deconstruction, from a mistrust in words, and from her passion to investigate things down to the tiniest detail.”
In her work Maurer reacts to our current social and political situation, which in the artist’s view is ridden with crisis. Her response subjects space, objects, and language to a – at times also comical – distortion.
SELBSTZERLEGUNG [Self-Deconstruction] is an extensive monologue that takes place amidst and with reference to deconstruction work on oversized spatial structures. Andrea Maurer employs letters, words, and sentences in the same manner as the wooden constructions, table legs, saws, and hammer: Nothing is left in its place. Reading and sawing here, stuttering and murmuring, drilling and hammering there.
Maurer exposes herself to these faltering constructions, literally throwing herself into a monologue that time and again goes back to beginning, never comes to a definite ending, and seems to deconstructs itself over the course of the performance.
SELBSTZERLEGUNG speaks of a fragmentary language, a language on the verge of a collapse in meaning, of our deficient usage of language, but also of the potentials of looking anew at what one says, even though one cannot say it.
[…] one divides and recombines what is essentially already there in the attempt to wrest a few more hieroglyphs from the catastrophe. (Hermann Burger, Ein Mann aus Wörtern [A Man of Words], 1983)
Welcome to Andrea Maurer’s deconstruction park
Andrea Maurer invites her audience to a performative “tour”, which can last from six to twelve hours. Like Alice in Wonderland, where objects and language lose their contours, the audience can move through the oversized objects in Maurer’s theme park, which she (de)constructs during her performance.
Biography
Andrea Maurer (*1978 in Salzburg) lives and works in Vienna. She realised numerous projects with the collective studio 5 between 2007 and 2013, which were presented internationally. Amongst others: “performance for a seated audience” (2010), “THE END” (2011), “meaning meaning” (2012), and the experimental film “der springende punkt. (the point.)” (2013). Maurer was awarded the Media Art Prize of the Province of Salzburg for the installation “Gesprächsgegenstände” (2013). Recent projects include the performances “Poelstra stolpert, Maurer sägt” (2014) and “SURE I AM NOT” (2016) in collaboration with Frans Poelstra, the piece “numbers in pieces” (2015), the ten-day performance “Die Baugrube” at the 2015 Festival of Regions, and the installation “still yet already” (2016). Maurer has been studying in the Object Sculpture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2009.
The H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance
The award is intended to enhance the visibility of performance art. The Kunstraum Niederoesterreich strives to draw a broader public to an artistic discipline that presents a special challenge to the artists – performances cannot be exhibited and marketed in the common understanding. The H13 is the only award for performance art in Austria. Since 2015 it is endowed with 4000 EUR prize money, and there is an additional production budget of 2000 EUR available for the performance on 01 09 2016.
