Friday 13 November 2009

Hildegard Spielhofer


//work in progress//

Hildegard Spielhofer

City Chairs, 2009

Site-specific installation

Neon sign, plastic chairs

Hildegard Spielhofer, with the support from Pro Helvetia and Swiss Cultural Program in Skopje, was able to travel to Skopje and produce a site-located work. City Chairs, 2009 is composed of a neon sign reading ‘Save this purple plastic chair’ in Macedonian and a body of chairs that are stacked inorderly in the yard of Press to Exit Project Space. The chairs are collected from donators living in Skopje, receiving a signed certificate from the artist confirming their participation in the production of the work. The ordinary everyday object becomes part of an artwork thus the artwork itself. If we recall the paraphrasing of Boris Groys, that artist is the one who can transform the objects of everyday into an artwork, Spielhofer is confronting us with this fact. Moreover, she is bringing us further with the framework of the whole piece. Plastic chairs are generic objects that can be found in anywhere all over the world, the possibility of producing them in large quantities for small amounts enables their mass production. For Spielhofer, ‘Delocalisation means the distance from a specific place, taking things away to put it somewhere else. It is the opposite of localisation. So the topic is not a specific place with its own language and culture, but it is about a daily movement of ideas, people and things. A situation everybody is affected by, nowadays. The notion of a site is based on the relation between physicality of things, so I will create relations at a specific site between things and humans.’

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