Lisa Hopf: Kyras Paradise & Ausgangpunkt N48° 02,82' E014° 18,18'
15 September – 4 October 2023
The exhibition opening will be on Friday, September 15, at 7 pm, at Photon Gallery Vienna.
Lisa Hopf (1990, AT) is the winner of the 10th edition of Photon’s open call Different Worlds 2022 for young photographers from Central and Eastern Europe. She presents her winning series Kyras Paradise together with AUSGANGSPUNKT N48° 02,82‘ E014° 18,18’ in a solo exhibition at Photon Gallery Vienna, which is the first prize for winning the open call.
Lisa’s artistic interest stems from her longtime involvement with dance. Working with her own body in relation to the space surrounding it led to a profound exploration of places, non-places, and the way people interact with them, which is evident in the two series presented. She is particularly interested in seemingly unnoticed urban spaces, which are often subject to strong changes. Her work has been shown in several notable exhibitions in Germany and Austria, including the Styrian Photobiennale (2022), in her solo exhibition Dualismus des Meeres, Nasty Butterflies are Crashing Racism at the OFF GRID, Independant Photo Festival in Vienna (2021) and in Research Spaces at OÖ Kulturquartier, Linz (2018).
Kyras Paradise, 2022
When the artist was doing research for her thesis on the beaches of Greece, she came across a cave in the Pilio area. Since she was deeply involved in the dualistic approach to the sea in theory, such as the theory of mare clausum and mare liberum, or the phenomenological approach of Deleuze and Guattari (smooth and striated spaces), this cave became another non-place that interested her. This room with a view – not far from romantic Greek resorts. It became an appropriation of space with an idyllic view not only because of its graffiti tags. Despite its barren bulkiness, this “room” offers shelter and refuge from the dangers of the outside world and creates space for identity formation. What people with a constant longing for the sea might wallpaper their living room with has dissolved its two-dimensional structure in this installation. Existing materials such as blinds and other found objects from the same beach are also reinterpreted and given a temporary purpose.
AUSGANGSPUNKT N48° 02,82‘ E014° 18,18‘, 2015-18
This series of works deals with the placement of people in geographic space. Starting from questions about the places that surround us – questions about subjective and objective perception, about individual as well as general systems of reference – she developed works that position themselves between photography, sculpture and installation. The analogue black-and-white photographs, taken on journeys and walks in her homeland, show mountain formations and coastal strips. In their simple beauty, the photographs contain a potential of one’s own movement in the landscape, influenced by personal perception and the geoinformation documented in them. It is precisely at these points, at the individually drawn horizon of vision or at the position of the compass, that the break is found – a bend that divides the photograph into up and down, left and right. This point of intersection is also found in the sculptures, which react to the exhibition space and are not only mediators between the viewer and the image, but also address the personal location in space as well as the changeability of this, but also the subjectivity of one’s own separation. AUSGANGSPUNKT N48° 02,82‘ E014° 18,18‘ is thus an examination of the relationship between one’s own body and the space surrounding it, and at the same time a reflection on one’s own arbitrariness in movement.
-Lukas Engert