Heimspiel

“Heimspiel” is a cross-border exhibition format at the Four-Country Point. Every three years, internationally established institutions open their programs for group exhibitions, affording an insight into current work in the visual arts in Eastern Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Vorarlberg. The renowned and the new, the established and the experimental alike, have their place here. The exhibition venues are the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Kunstraum Dornbirn, the Ziegelhütte Kunsthalle in Appenzell and Kunsthaus Glarus. The exhibition cooperation is intended to foster encounters, networking, communication and international exchange.

The program of Kunstraum Dornbirn focuses on extensive spatial installations and environments created by national and international artists, which are usually specifically designed for and produced in the space. In “Heimspiel” we depart from this programmatic focus. Video works by Gilgi Guggenheim, Claudia Larcher, Ursula Palla, Stoph Sauter, Liddy Scheffknecht, Veronika Schubert and Cristina Witzig, an object by Simon Kindle and performances by Bella Angora and Ronja Svaneborg find their place in this site-specific exhibition.

Kunstraum Dornbirn as black box

The historic assembly hall is being transformed into a black box for negotiating space and place, perception and light and their reflection, change and loss in film, video and media works. A darkened room deprives us of all points of reference and orientation. In the exhibition process, the black box creates a spatial situation within the existing architecture that divests it of its visible parameters. Seeing and hearing can be guided in a targeted manner, media such as projection, which in daylight would be invisible, become concentrated sources of light. The interplay of the artistic positions in their respective visual independence offers a focused view of the negotiated topics.

Liddy Scheffknecht: sun tube (2015) and Raumfahrt (2001)

Liddy Scheffknecht, born in 1980 in Dornbirn, lives and works in Vienna. In her work, the superimposition of time and space creates images and places almost incidentally, playing with perception and deception. She probes the boundaries of film, photography, installation and drawing. For her image inventions she works in the field of tension between light and shadow, movement and stasis, using the means of staged illusion, which she conjures up only to dissolve again in the next moment. Here the relationship between time and perception plays an essential role.

The video work sun tube shows a compressed tube of paint that appears to have leaked out in a glowing green spot. The patch of colour increasingly develops a life of its own, barely noticeable at first: slowly, it wanders across the table top. This takes place not because of digital manipulation but because of the inclusion of sunlight: the colour spot is a patch of sun that has been coloured by attaching a green film to the window. When a cloud moves in front of the sun, the spot slowly fades; when the cloud moves on, the spot becomes less diffuse. Sunlight and resulting reflection become a plastic material.

Scheffknecht’s film work Raumfahrt seems removed from earthly spatial parameters. In the dark, a narrow strip of light is visible which seems constantly to be undergoing transformation. After a few minutes, once the eyes have got used to the darkness, you can see that the narrow strip of light is scanning a room and that what becomes visible in fragments is changing constantly through the movement.