Lone Haugaard Madsen

Code Art Fair 2017 — Lone Haugaard Madsen from I DO ART Agency on Vimeo.

What does work mean to us today? Are we talking about production, the provision of services, freelancing, paid or unpaid work, disenfranchised work, the abolition or omnipresence of work? In her artistic examination of the concept of work, Lone Haugaard Madsen establishes cross-references between the subjective and the public, socio-political sphere.

When LHM came to Vienna in 2001 to study Textual Sculpture with Heimo Zobernig, she founded an academy within the Academy. She invited museum people and artists with the aim of initiating conversations. With her work on constellations, the meeting of people and objects, she began to provoke situations in which questions of production and representation were put up for discussion.

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At Sophie Tappeiner, LHM exhibits remnants of theater productions, as well as plaster, bronze, aluminum, wood, plastic, and oil on canvas, among other things. She allows them to react to one another, gives them a little nudge, intervenes.

In the combining interplay of materials and objects, the artist allows references to circulate, overcomes the boundaries of a formatted knowledge, fluctuates between nature and culture, between coincidence and plan. Coincidence represents commitment to a situation, an activation of the senses. And yet the desire to give shape to the situation is inscribed in the method of production. Surrendering to coincidence means engaging in a formative process, reacting to influences that should perhaps have been overcome using specific techniques. It is a concession to the inherent dynamics of processes, to changeability. To intervene in processes means making a decision, formulating an assertion, answering and taking responsibility. Work, in this conception, is a deeply political process.

Eva Maria Stadler

Sophie Tappeiner Gallery