Gerhard Lang
area: Visual Arts, Performance
Key Facts
nationality
Germanyarea
Visual Arts, Performanceresidence
Schloss-Nauses and Londonrecommending institution
SCHAURAUM Angewandtetime period
February 2018 - February 2018Gerhard Lang’s art work is poeticised science. His research involves investigating cultural processes, e.g. that of perception. How we explain our existence and the world is subjected here to a close examination that is both earnest and playful. In this context, the essential question for Lang is how landscape and man are related. Lang’s specific strategy of analysis employs a wide variety of acoustic and pictorial processes that he incorporates into his work in a performative and playful manner.
GERHARD LANG (* 1963) studied at the School of Arts and Design at the University of Kassel before studying MA at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. Lang’s work has been shown widely, including the Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, PS1 in New York City, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the Triennale Milano, the Architecture Biennale in São Paulo, the MMKK in Klagenfurt and documenta 14 in Kassel. He has received numerous awards, including the Gulbenkian Research Award, the Studio grant by the Stiftung Kunstfonds in Bonn and the New York City grant of the Hessische Kulturstiftung in Wiesbaden. Gerhard Lang teaches regularly in various artistic fields at several universities. His international teaching practice also involves other disciplines such as architecture, pedagogy and theology.
Before the police search for the unknown culprit, they create a picture of the unknown – an identikit photograph.
Thus the police give every case a face, and with it they cautiously approach the unknown, the foreign, the disconcerting. Since the early 90s, Gerhard Lang has been using an old identikit device of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). From four faces its mirror assembly creates one new single face: the identikit photograph. In 2000, at the invitation of Cathrin Pichler and Roman Berka of the museum in progress, Lang responded to the first right-wing conservative government coalition between the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Vienna by publishing the identikit image of The Government in the newspaper Der Standard.
<link http: www.mip.at creations transact-39>www.mip.at/creations/transact-39
In his performance with the identikit apparatus at the opening event on February 28, 2018, documenta-participant Gerhard Lang will explore new realms and spaces beyond the human face.