Photo/Politics/Austria

The exhibition Photo/Politics/Austria takes you on a photographic journey through Austrian history from 1918 to the present. This project is undertaken in cooperation with Photoinstitut Bonartes and shows around 100 works from the mumok photographs collection, and additional loans from national and international institutions.
Photo/Politics/Austria is an attempt to visualize Austrian history of the last 100 years using selected photos or photo series that show special events or situations. These include a postcard series of the fire at the Palace of Justice (1927), Friedl Dicker‘s socially critical collages (1931), Ernst Haas‘s Heimkehrer(1947), and Seiichi Furuya’s State Border (1981/83), images that are just as much part of a panorama of a turbulent history as Kiki Kogelnik’s Vienna Street Pictures (1967) or a screenshot of Hans Krankl in Cordoba (1978).
Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer compared the reality of the camera with reality as constructed through historical knowledge. Both media show the present as just one part of the whole. This exhibition Photo/Politics/Austria, designed by the artist Markus Schinwald, uses press photographs, interventions, newspaper cuttings, posters, and film stills as “head pictures” (Michael Diers), that complement and sharpen the “headlines” of the past.

Curated by Monika Faber und Susanne Neuburger