Kontakt Video Portraits
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The Kontakt Collection and its research-based activities concentrate on the Central, Eastern, and Southern European cultural output that has accompanied recent decades’ social and political developments and hence enriched art history by significant neo-avant-garde works ever since the 1950s. Numerous artists, curators, and theoreticians are direct witness to the transformative processes surrounding the key years of 1968 and 1989, processes that also entailed fundamental changes for art.
The lion’s share of the portraits filmed thus far are now accessible via the Kontakt Collection website. The Austrian daily newspaper DER STANDARD was also brought on board and has been presenting selected portraits on a weekly basis since 3 March 2024 to mark the occasion of the Kontakt Collection’s 20th birthday. This gives rise to an intangible museum in the digital realm whose substantive components can be accessed at any time.
https://www.derstandard.at/video
The Kontakt Video Portraits shed light on these influences and their impacts on artistic, literary, and theoretical output, thus continuing a tradition of art-historically significant Austrian projects that includes the “Portraits of Artists” curated by Peter Kogler for the “museum in progress,” which depict an impressive panorama of international artistic perspectives from the 1990s, as well as Wilhelm Gaube’s body of work from the 1960s and 1970s encompassing approximately 250 artist portraits.
Claus Philipp: “The long-term projects of Wilhlem Gaube and the ‘museum in progress’ had already accomplished sweeping, networked portrayals of contemporary artistic production and thought. And just what such an approach can mean when applied to Vienna and the Kontakt Collection can be seen quite clearly when one views the portraits we’ve already produced. Even if we have our counterparts speak individually, they are in fact speaking with or even about each other. In today’s media environment, such a large-scale project is something that one would really have to consider impossible. And so we continue!”
https://www.kontakt-collection.org/portraits
March 2024
The lion’s share of the portraits filmed thus far are now accessible via the Kontakt Collection website. The Austrian daily newspaper DER STANDARD was also brought on board and has been presenting selected portraits on a weekly basis since 3 March 2024 to mark the occasion of the Kontakt Collection’s 20th birthday. This gives rise to an intangible museum in the digital realm whose substantive components can be accessed at any time.
https://www.derstandard.at/video
The Kontakt Video Portraits shed light on these influences and their impacts on artistic, literary, and theoretical output, thus continuing a tradition of art-historically significant Austrian projects that includes the “Portraits of Artists” curated by Peter Kogler for the “museum in progress,” which depict an impressive panorama of international artistic perspectives from the 1990s, as well as Wilhelm Gaube’s body of work from the 1960s and 1970s encompassing approximately 250 artist portraits.
Claus Philipp: “The long-term projects of Wilhlem Gaube and the ‘museum in progress’ had already accomplished sweeping, networked portrayals of contemporary artistic production and thought. And just what such an approach can mean when applied to Vienna and the Kontakt Collection can be seen quite clearly when one views the portraits we’ve already produced. Even if we have our counterparts speak individually, they are in fact speaking with or even about each other. In today’s media environment, such a large-scale project is something that one would really have to consider impossible. And so we continue!”
https://www.kontakt-collection.org/portraits
March 2024