Lois Weinberger
documenta 14, Athens and Kassel
8 April – 17 September 2017
documenta 14 – directed by Adam Szymczyk and entitled Learning from Athens was held in Athens and Kassel from April to September 2017. For this biennial, Phileas, in collaboration with the Austrian Federal Chancellery, co-produced a series of new works by the Austrian artist Lois Weinberger. Weinberger developed separate projects for each venue, which speak to the passing of time and to the conflict between nature and culture. His subtle and prescient framing of found objects vs. forced objects and processes echoed documenta 14’s over-arching curatorial concepts of identity, belonging, and alienation in “modern-day” Europe.
A self-professed field worker, Lois Weinberger takes wild plants – weeds – as his initial point of orientation in his ongoing artistic investigation of natural and artificial spaces. His work – consisting of notes, drawings, photographs, objects, texts, films, as well as big projects in public space – is based around a poetic-political network that draws our attention to marginal zones and questions hierarchies of various types.
Lois Weinberger (born 1947 in Stams, Austria) lives and works in Vienna and in Gars am Kamp, Austria. His work has been included in documenta X (Kassel, 1997) and in the 53rd La Biennale di Venezia in 2009. He has had a number of solo exhibitions in international institutions, including Kunsthalle Mainz (2015); M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent (2015); GARDEN Gare de Rennes, Les Prairies Biennale d’Art Contemporain Rennes (2012); Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (2008) and Arnolfini, Bristol (2006). Past group exhibitions include Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, GuangDong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2014); Kadist Art Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Soleil Politique, Museion, Bozen (2014); Ephemeropterae, TBA21, Vienna (2013); Kunst nach 45, Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2012); Tropicomania, Betonsalon/ Triennale Paris (2012); The Death of the Audience, Wiener Secession (2009).
