Alpine Gothic at the Mönchsberg

Through January 30, 2023 visitors of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg on the Mönchsberg have the opportunity to see works of the collective Alpine Gothic in the auditorium.

The artists' collective Alpine Gothic was founded in 2009 by Christina Breitfuß, Erik Hable and Wolfgang Wirth. In their works they investigate phenomena, myths and tiruals of the rural space.

Four works by Alpine Gothic are currently on display in the Mönchsberg auditorium, which has been converted into an exhibition space:

The video Black Saliva developed from the exploration of a technique used in cave paintings: a pigment slurry was made by chewing charcoal and then spat onto the cave walls. Saliva served as a binding agent. For their painting actions, the artists used commercially available charcoal tablets and, instead of rock walls, arranged sheets of fabric or crumpled paper into cave-like, claustrophobic spaces. Smoothed out, these supports reveal intriguing graphic works that bear no trace of the physical exertion and radical working method used to produce them.

The first public performance took place in 2011 as part of the group exhibition Demnächst. Orte für werdende Kunst (Coming Soon. Places for Originating Art) at the Salzburg Gallery 5020. The focus lay on questions about art production and the conditions of artistic work processes. The video documentation created there is shown on a flatscreen and provides insight into the setting of the cave built and the paper webs created during the performance.

In parallel, a second video documentation refers to the most recent performance –  Geste 2 (Gesture 2) – on the ongoing project at the Toihaus Theater in Salzburg on November 5, 2022, in which the audience was encouraged to participate in the performance themselves in an altered functional setting reminiscent of a bar. A sculptural spatial object not only offered the charcoal tablets that were handed to the participants by a female performer, but also served as a frame for the paper surface to be spat upon.

A supplementary video shows a tracking shot through a saliva-spat setting.

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