All Work No Play: NINA HOECHTL, LUKE MCCREADIE & VALENTIN RUHRY

About

A performative talk by Nina Hoechtl & Ruth Kaaserer, Athletic FeMale Bodies in Boxing & Lucha Libre, will take place on 9 October 2012, 7:00 pm.

--

After Formless, an evening of events in May, for the exhibition 'All Work No Play' the artists Nina Hoechtl, Luke McCreadie and Valentin Ruhry will work together to combine their very diverse practices from performance to sculpture and film, in order to open up the concept of play.

The artists will engage with the idea of play, conscious of its relation to the omnipresent Olympic games. Play in all its forms is a strategy, it can be a bad strategy as easily as it can be a good one. It can be used as an escape or as a way of confronting something. What is most interesting about this word is that it is not easily pinned down. As a verb it does not easily describe any one thing in particular. Play is an understatement as a term, but as a process it can lead to a freeing of previous constraints and offer the opportunity to stop, admit mistakes and try again. As an abstract notion of discovery, playing can be slippery, elusive and meaningless or it can offer the potential for unchartered and entirely new ground. It can be the repetition of old habits or a kind of prospecting for a latent realisation of content. They will explore the paradox of the throw away nature usually associated with play and the possibility that something serious might come of it.

--

Nina Hoechtl was born 1978, lives and works in Mexico City. Hoechtl explores the fictional modes of art, literature, politics, history, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the practice of fiction-making as a political process. In doing so she employs the media of video and photography, works with found materials, language and sound, and produces printed matters and installations.

Luke McCreadie was born 1985, lives and works in London. McCreadie uses a breakdown in the transferal of information as a starting point, what then comes after is an attempt at reassessing the nature of meaning, verbal and visual language as well as what it is to exist in a permanent state of reading. Using mainly sculpture and film he investigates the roles of object and subject.

Valentin Ruhry was born 1982, lives and works in Vienna. In Valentin Ruhry's works, it is the simple elements that seem to become more than what they are - not technical features, rather electricity in its pure form, how it accomplishes the distance to the light bulb and the neon tube, is aestheticised by the artist. The sculptural process concentrates on the modelling of light, light media, and their components. They form the heart around which the artist weaves his story and the necessary supplements.

--

The Visual Arts Platform is curated by Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques and presents emerging artists through exhibitions and other events. The Visual Arts Platform began in 2006 and continues into its seventh year in 2012 with a programme of collaborations between Austrian and UK artists. It will end with a book that brings together all projects which took place in the last 7 years, which will be presented at the ACF on the 17th of January 2013.