Migros Museum
Limmatstrasse 270
Zürich
+41 44 277 20 50
Markus Schinwald
February 16-
May 18, 2008

The psychological debate between space and body, the uncanny and the disquieting, the deficits and the irrational depths of the individual and collective being — all are at play in the works of Markus Schinwald (b. 1973, Salzburg). The most varied media are fused with lightness in his work — from nightmarish films and puppet-like sculptures to re-worked history painting, and prosthetic design and clothes creations, subtly choreographed with one another. In his largest solo museum exhibition to date, Schinwald has created an architectonic production, which in its display is oriented to the spatial designs of Austro-American stage designer and artist, Friedrich Kiesler (1890-1965).

The human body, inadequate and uncanny, serves Schinwald as a starting and observation point. He does not exhibit a firm, stable body whose function as controlled exterior is out of control, but a diaphanous, osmotic body stage, a surface for psychologically charged inner worlds, that constantly seek a path to the outside and manifesting there. In the film 1st Part Conditional (2004), a classic Biedermeier apartment is a set for psychologically charged layers. A female figure in a grey uniform moves with spastic motions through the room while an “off” voice recites fragments of scientific and literary texts. An observer of unknown power forces the puppet-like woman to collapse. The disquieting breakdown appears to be alien and self-controlled in equal measure. The effect is similar when Schinwald makes subtle interventions in the subjects featured in old engravings and paintings, equipping them with (un)canny attributes, such as ambiguous gadgetry and prosthetic accessories. Through a temporal break(through) the apparently consolidated historical body is given a different bodily surface.

In Foucauldian terms the body is point zero where all paths and spaces cross. In Schinwald’s works the body reacts symptomatically to inner conditions, and mirrors outer experience in its pose. Schinwald's scenarios do not follow linear narration, but circulate obsessively and repetitively mid-content. With cool minimal staging, at first glance the films, images and sculptures condense themselves into a complex structure of effect, permitting a multiplicity of possibilities and stories, fed from our collective unconscious. They hijack the observer in a self-supporting cosmos, in an uncanny surreal system, where normative limits are abrogated in favour of the enigmatic and the marvellous.

Thus the presentation of the works in the exhibition is not constricted to a simple arrangement. In its isolation the white cube departs from the environment of its alienated location, but through an auratic, psychological element it is supplemented and weaves the space into the narration. For the exhibition, Schinwald has constructed a modular wood construction in the manner of the architect, stage designer and artist Frederick Kiesler, which draws one through the space like a guide. The exhibition display is determined by a Trager and Leger system, which integrates the observer into the spatial and temporal framework. Kiesler developed the T+L System in 1924 for the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exhibition of New Theatre Technology) in Vienna, and it makes for a flexible, free-standing construction for the presentation of objects and images, which at the same time reconsiders the attempt to reform antiquated exhibition presentations. This modernist wood construction enables the artist to play a refined game of the visible and concealed. The observer is once more made conscious of his/her role as an “active viewer” and is offered the chance to develop and follow his/her own analogies and narrative threads.