Book launch of Veronika Eberhart’s publication “Garten Sprengen”
4 July 2024, 6.30pm
Phileas, Opernring 17, 1010 Vienna
On the occasion of Veronika Eberhart's solo exhibition Garten sprengen at the IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, which Phileas has co-produced and ran until March 2024, we hosted the book launch of the publication accompanying the exhibition.
The show was inspired by the biography of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler. Born into an education-orientated bourgeois family in 1898, Eisler was a close friend of Bertolt Brecht, and is most widely remembered today for having composed the national anthem of the GDR (the former East Germany). After 1933, Eisler's music and Brecht's poetry were banned by the Nazi Party. Both artists went into exile. While Brecht settled in Denmark, Eisler traveled and worked in Prague, Vienna, Paris, London, Moscow, Spain, Mexico and Denmark, before settling in Los Angeles in 1938. There, he was wrongly accused by the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) to be a spy for the Soviet Union. Eberhart took Eisler’s turbulent biography – his time in Los Angeles especially – as a starting point for her new film Garten sprengen (Watering the garden), named after a poem of the same name by Brecht from 1942, for which Eisler composed the score. In the film, Eberhart thematizes notions of exile as a catalyst for creativity. This subject is further explored through a new series of photographic works, as well as sculptures.
Published by Spector Books, the publication Garten sprengen contains texts by Kevin Vennemann, Brenda Guesnet, who curated the exhibition, Ian F. Svenonius and Veronika Eberhart. The book design was done by Marie Artaker. During the book launch, a discussion will be held between the artist, Brenda Guesnet and Vanessa Joan Müller.
Veronika Eberhart (born 1982 in Bad Radkersburg, Austria) works with a transdisciplinary approach that combines video, sound, performance and sculpture. Eberhart studied sociology before finding her path towards the visual arts. Her work unfolds through rigorous research, often interpreting a specific historical reference into complex arrangements encompassing video, sculpture, and installation. While her works are frequently rooted in specific places, their sense of time remains ambiguous. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Belvedere 21, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunstraum Niederösterreich and CalArts, Los Angeles. The exhibition was her first collaboration with Phileas.
