Gabriela Oberkofler
15 Jul - 13 Sep 2015
GABRIELA OBERKOFLER
Über den Zaun
15 July – 13 September 2015
In the south wing of the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, the artist Gabriela Oberkofler (*1975 in Bozen) is creating a room installation that invites visitors to actively participate in creating art and to become part of an artwork themselves in the process. For this, the artist asks us to collect blossoms, flowers, or herbs and bring this wild growth to us in the museum. The plants will then be dried on-site in special flower presses and become part of a large collage.
This participatory “art action” raises not only general questions regarding collecting, selecting, and evaluating and, in the process, reflects on the different roles of artists, public, and museums within our society and surroundings. “Über den Zaun” (Over the Fence) also takes aim at the borders inherent in art, at the questioning of these borders, and at how many weeds a culture tolerates and/or how much wild growth in art and culture can still be permitted today. Since, without wild growth, art inevitably heads towards a globalized monoculture, in which only the productive, useful plants are cultivated in order to consolidate the hegemony a bit further.
Gabriela Oberkofler comes from a mountain farmer family in South Tyrol and went to study art in Stuttgart, where she lives and works today. In her works – a mixture of very diverse media comprising performance, video, photography, drawing, installations, and objects – Oberkofler reflects on her native mountain world in contrast to the dominance of urban living. She interconnects questions of retrospection and progress, of personal and collective culture of memory, of the search for identity and the analysis of one’s own origins in her conceptual approaches and always negotiates this arc of tension anew in the process.
Über den Zaun
15 July – 13 September 2015
In the south wing of the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, the artist Gabriela Oberkofler (*1975 in Bozen) is creating a room installation that invites visitors to actively participate in creating art and to become part of an artwork themselves in the process. For this, the artist asks us to collect blossoms, flowers, or herbs and bring this wild growth to us in the museum. The plants will then be dried on-site in special flower presses and become part of a large collage.
This participatory “art action” raises not only general questions regarding collecting, selecting, and evaluating and, in the process, reflects on the different roles of artists, public, and museums within our society and surroundings. “Über den Zaun” (Over the Fence) also takes aim at the borders inherent in art, at the questioning of these borders, and at how many weeds a culture tolerates and/or how much wild growth in art and culture can still be permitted today. Since, without wild growth, art inevitably heads towards a globalized monoculture, in which only the productive, useful plants are cultivated in order to consolidate the hegemony a bit further.
Gabriela Oberkofler comes from a mountain farmer family in South Tyrol and went to study art in Stuttgart, where she lives and works today. In her works – a mixture of very diverse media comprising performance, video, photography, drawing, installations, and objects – Oberkofler reflects on her native mountain world in contrast to the dominance of urban living. She interconnects questions of retrospection and progress, of personal and collective culture of memory, of the search for identity and the analysis of one’s own origins in her conceptual approaches and always negotiates this arc of tension anew in the process.