Hallo Hollow at Kunstraum Lakeside, 2023 installation shot, photos by Johannes Puch
Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt
October 4 – November 10, 2023
Hallow Hollow is part of the 2023 catalog of Kunstraum Lakeside Published by VFMK.
Hallow Hollow was initally installed as a solo show at the Gundula Gruber Gallery in 2022 titled MAGA Meets Marie and was reviewed by Brian Hamon for Art Asia Pacific.
THE EXHIBIT
"Two words that almost sound the same but have a single different vowel: Hallow Hollow reads the title of the exhibition by Stephanie Misa in Kunstraum Lakeside. The verb “hallow”—to venerate, honor as sacred, or to sanctify—is juxtaposed with “hollow”—empty, having a space or cavity inside—without any grammatical and sequential reference or an ostensible meaningful connection. The similarity of the words, however, invites us to ponder whatever might connect them. With the conjunction of two seemingly discrete units, the title alludes to a spatial contiguity that informs the entire exhibition: in the Kunstraum, Misa presents individual, stand-alone elements side-by-side, like in an encyclopedia, and leaves it up to the viewer to draw the connections between them.
Stephanie Misa looks back at the past in two ways: on the one hand, at the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021—the attack on the joint session of the United States Congress by supporters of Donald Trump, who was still acting president at the time but had already been voted out of office—and, on the other, at her own preoccupation with this event in an exhibition in Gallery Gundula Gruber in 2021. Combining previous works with new elements, the artist explores how the discourse on the Capitol attack has changed nearly three and a half years after the incident and her initial artistic engagement."
Photos by Johannes Puch
The chandelier, candles, and carpet have less of a direct connection to the storming of the Washington landmark. Rather, they echo notions of Western luxury, syncretic voodoo practices, or a traditional poor-people meal. Misa calls this installation from 2021 The Séance, which couples times and places that have little to do with one another at first glance. The same applies to the words on the banners that, apart from their first letter, hardly reveal anything that connects them. And perhaps it is precisely this lack of coherence that makes it possible to understand events like the Capitol attack, if not fully, then at least to grasp some of their facets. After all, what we are dealing with here is a phenomenon in Western democracies, when people with seemingly disparate interests unite—such as a billionaire and down-trodden Americans, the Proud Boys as far-right, male-only proponents of white supremacy and their former (and newly incarcerated) black leader Enrique Tario, or the numerous men who yearn for a USA in a world that never existed, and marginalized immigrants who also share this dream. Like Misa’s choice of elements—objects as well as words—are vague connections that summon us to draw a relationship between them...”
Gudrun Ratzinger & Franz Thalmair, Curators