Arnolfini present Lois & Franziska Weinberger
Lois & Franziska Weinberger, Home Voodoo II, 2004, 20 colour photographs, each 30 x 42 cm, ed. 5.
This winter, Arnolfini hosts the first major UK solo exhibition of Austrian artist-duo, Lois and Franziska Weinberger. The exhibition includes new commissions as well as existing works which have been selected and re-made for the Bristol context. Their practice includes sculpture, found objects, text pieces, large-scale mural drawings and maps, slide works, photography, video installations and site-specific interventions.
The starting point for the Weinbergers’ research is the idea of the garden as a metaphor for society. They refer to this as a site which is in constant flux rather than something fixed and unchanging. Within this "perfectly provisional realm", as they term it, they investigate the interaction between the uncontrolled forces of nature and socially imposed concepts of order and value. By observing the patterns of growth of wild plants within the city, and their effect upon the structures of urban life, their work becomes a political metaphor, suggesting models for alternative ways of living.
The Garden Archive presents a large collection of slide images of wild urban plants, commonly referred to as ‘weeds’. These plants were collected, over an eleven-year period, from Central and Eastern Europe and cultivated in a garden in Vienna by Lois Weinberger. Despite being the scourge of civilised society, this wild vegetation is characterised by its capacity for survival in the most inhospitable conditions, on the fringes of urban life. For the German festival Documenta X, Weinberger re-planted these plants in the heart of the city, making a garden amongst the tracks of a disused railway line and digging up pavements around the central station in Kassel.
The exhibition at Arnolfini includes the Weinbergers’ recent Home Voodoo photographic series, as well as the Transportable Garden, the Garden Archive, a Marginal Room of drawings and found objects, and other works. LINK
