HEIDI HOLLEIS
Curated by Ivana Marjanović
Innsbruck-based artist Heidi Holleis presents her recent artwork that is haunted by the ghosts of the past and preoccupied with the question of how we will overcome the current capitalist state of exploitation, appropriation, and consumption. Holleis reflects on critique and on the capacity of resistance within the neo-liberal loop using references that range from pop culture, styles of the 80s and play culture to political thinkers such as Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida and Avery F. Gordon.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels opens with the famous sentence “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” This spectre which found its ways into state orders was challenged during the 20th century and it has preoccupied thinkers since the end of the Cold War. In his book The Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida discussed the future of Marxism and emphasized on the significance of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Today as we are faced with one crisis after another--the current extraction war(s) over the Earth’s limited resources and the rise of neo-fascism, to name a few-- Heidi Holleis (again) turns our attention to the spectre of Marx and offers a critical impulse.
In the new
Out of Paku Paku
series painted with oil on canvas, Heidi Holleis creates playful and ironic painterly contemplations on the 1980s popular culture, consumerism and video games. Out of Paku Paku departs from one of the first big shots in the gaming industry, the Japanese maze action game PAC MAN. Named after the expression “pacu pacu” which means repeated opening and closing of the mouth, Pac Man represents the iconic figure of consumption intensification. The task of Pac Man (i.e. of the gamer) is to eat/collect as many dots as possible. The insatiable yellow “circle,” Pac Man, is chased by four different-colored ghosts, the ghostly presence and power of which cannot be eliminated (but it can be temporarily paralyzed). Many of us remember Pac Man, if not directly from playing the game, then from the producer’s well-known and globally mark merchandise. Even when the 1980s represent memories from the artist’s childhood and youth, the Out of Paku Paku series has a lot to do with Holleis’s long-standing research and preoccupation with ghosts and hauntology. Popular culture references brought back color and invigorated Holleis’s painterly work, however along with a critique of consumer society, the series reflects styles and culture as formulations of alternatives and critique of capitalism (from music, gaming, fashion, clubbing to street art).
The exhibition title No More Profit directly quotes the title and the content of the artwork
No more profit
(2019 – 2021), which belongs to the earlier series called Fantom Force.
What does Heidi Holleis want to say with her spooky post-conceptual art work created with the fumage technique invented by the surrealists? Using artistic technique and material as a conceptual tools, Holleis “draws” with fire, smoke and collaging, the artist invokes not one ghost, but many into her images - the whole society of ghosts. These “creatures”, phantoms - neither alive nor dead, neither human nor animal, neither visible nor invisible -- float in the white backgrounds of the images. She calls them “exceptional phantoms”. As an artist, Heidi Holleis doesn’t fix the meaning of her works (also a conceptual decision, and asks who can define who and what ghosts are?). With her work, she wants us to form our own ideas loosely related to the socio-political urgencies around them. However, in the context of Holleis’ oeuvre, the statement No More Profit cannot not remind us of Karl Marx and his critique of profit as capitalist appropriation of surplus value extracted from labour for more than what is necessary for life’s reproduction. The other “fumage image”
How can it be?
(2021) shows the text “How can it be I am no longer” emerging from traces of smoke. Is this Karl Marx complaining about the marginalization of his ideas today? In another piece, Holleis adds a comment about an episode of ghostly violence called
Today I was sexually molested by a 70 year old collector
(2021). Like this world we inhabit, ghosts can be “progressive” as well as dangerously conservative.
Heidi Holleis’s feminist position also permeates her
Out of Paku Paku
series. In addition to the lightness and stylishness characteristic of the 80s revival that capitalizes on the past (visible, for instance, in her use of color scales and aesthetics from 80s posters, etc.), these paintings also communicate a brutal context: the in/visible hand of capitalism, interventionist global economy and neocolonial tourism, within which Pac Man’s enemy, a “Pink Ghost” named Pinky, is situated. Pinky assumes a monumental place in the series (as opposed to Pac Man who is portrayed as a quiet tiny dot in this universe). This genderless specter gradually acquires “feminine” features, and can be speculatively interpreted as a reference to (queer-) feminist positions. One could also anticipate other ghosts of “Pac Man” in the future, who might further diversify the image and its discourses.
Depending at which of the two stations one enters the exhibition, there is a different beginning and ending of its dramaturgy. The first is a “
Generation Z
” (GZ, 2022) type dramaturgy, providing a symbolic glimpse into the future with a momentum from the gender-fluid non- binary digital natives who protest for ecological survival in cities where, at sunrise, the streets are filled with loads of delivery cardboard boxes waiting to be picked up by the garbage service. The second dramaturgical arc is the “
Magic Room – Meditate with Karl
” in which works from the series of graphics and collages on paper Complementary Affairs (2017-2020) are presented. Here we are left alone with Karl Marx and his ghost(s) to contemplate what we might be able to do with Marx’s thinking today?
In between these are several works from Holleis’s earlier artistic explorations of ashes as material, and assemblage paintings made out of cardboard product packages, which create a connection to the beginning of the artist’s reflections on consumerism through abstract art The Systhem is written on a Box (2013), We love to consume 1-4 (2013), Do you fear? (2013-2020).
ABOUT THE ARTIST
“I am not afraid of ghosts but rather of people who are afraid of ghosts.” (Heidi Holleis)
Heidi Holleis, born in 1974 in Innsbruck; lives and works in Innsbruck. Heidi Holleis works with the media of painting, collage, photography, installation and analogue as well as digital printmaking. She is inspired, for instance, by sociopolitical, philosophical or scientific issues, certain aspects of which she carries over into her artistic work.
She has received numerous awards and stipends including the 35th annual Award for Austrian Graphic Art from the province of Vorarlberg in 2017; Award for Contemporary Art from the province of Tyrol in 2017. Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including: Collection of the Province of Tyrol; City of Innsbruck; Artothek, Federal Collection, Belvedere21, Vienna; Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck.
Her works have been presented at numerous exhibitions, including: 2021 SOLO SHOW: RESERVE ARMY OF LABOUR, Reich für die Insel, Heart of Noise Festival, Innsbruck (curated by #distinguishedAF); 2019 SOLO SHOW: Fantom Force, Sussudio, Vienna (curated by Katharina Stiglitz); 2019 SOLO SHOWS: The ghost is me, openspace.innsbruck, Innsbruck (curated by Charly Walther); 2018 GROUP SHOW: Tirol.export, Parallel Vienna, (curated by Maximilian Thoman and Simeon Brugger); 2016 GROUP SHOW: Asche, ExtraRaum, Wien (curated by Jeannot Schwarz); 2015 SOLO SHOW: POLY X, St. Jakob’s Dome, Innsbruck (curated by Elisabeth and Gerhard Larcher); 2015 GROUP-SHOW: set in motion, Kunstraum Innsbruck (curated by Karin Pernegger).
For further information, visit: https://heidiholleis.net/
EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBTION
OPENING
02.12.22, 19:00
NO MORE PROFIT
with Heidi Holleis
PERFORMANCE
08./9./10.12.22, 18:00-20:00
DIE GROSSE SONJA RITZ SHOW
with OFFTANZ
ARTIST TALK
15.12.22, 18:00
NO MORE PROFIT
with Heidi Holleis
WORKSHOP
20.01.23, 16:00
FEMINIST HORROR
with Michaela Bstieler und Melinka Karrer
GUIDED TOUR
08.02.23, 18:00
NO MORE PROFIT
LECTURE PERFORMANCE
16.02.23, 19:00
ANTIFASCIST SPIRITS
with Nataša Mackuljak
