Press Release June 10, 2008 TIEFENRAUSCH Art and Guided Tours in the Underworlds of Linz May 30 – July 13, 2008 A Project by the OK Center for Contemporary Art for Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture OK | Museum of the Underworlds Aktienkeller | Stream of Forgetting Landstraße | Manhole Covers Linz Underground | Crypts, Tunnels, Cisterns OK Platz | 40,000 Liters of Attersee Lake Water TIEFENRAUSCH (rapture of the deep) is a multi-part exhibition dispersed throughout the city, a complex, multi- layered undertaking, a blend of art projects and museum objects, narratives drawn from everyday life and investigations phrased in terms of cultural scholarship, out-of-the-ordinary venues and totally pragmatic guided tours. The point of departure is the Museum of the Underworlds in the OK. In downtown Linz, TIEFENRAUSCH will be visible along Landstrasse, where red plastic pipes designed by Linz Art University students are replacing the conventional manhole covers. In the Aktienkeller, OK is staging a major international art exhibition on the subject of “Remembering – Forgetting.” Plus, TIEFENRAUSCH is offering an array of guided tours to underground sites that are usually off-limits to the general public: the system of tunnels built by the Nazis, drinking water reservoirs and the crypts of Old City churches. A multipart catalog is being issued in conjunction with this project. In the first volume, which premiered at the exhibition’s opening, cultural philosopher Thomas Macho touches on a broad spectrum of conceptions, locations and conditions subsumed under the heading of underworld. Volume 2 will be released in late June, and #3 at the finissage. TIEFENRAUSCH ____________________________________________________________________________________ _________ MUSEUM OF THE UNDERWORLDS IN THE OK The cultural-historical portion of the exhibition curated by Brigitte Felderer A Museum of the Underworlds has been installed in the OK’s exhibition spaces in conjunction with Tiefenrausch. This portion of the exhibition dedicated to the history of culture has been curated by Brigitte Felderer. On display are rare and valuable documents, objects and works of art that illustrate the underworld’s long cultural history. Human conquest of Earth’s subterranean realm is still subject to technical limitations, and our conception of the world below us is only slightly determined by the possibilities technological progress affords. To this day, the deepest holes drilled by man penetrate hardly more than 12 kilometers into the Earth’s crust. Rather, our familiarity with the underworld is the result of a long history of fascination. The exhibition includes representations of hells—both mythic and mundane—as well as images of Purgatory as perceived by a wide variety of artists. Damnation, the Last Judgment, the descent into Hell, the flight from the underworld and conveyance into Hades have been visually branded into the collective consciousness and remain inseparably linked with the depth psychology of the modern individual. A social substratum that has unfolded beneath the superficial veneers of convention and under the pressure of prevailing circumstances is displayed critically in early photographs. But these aren’t the only counter-worlds placed on public viewing; the depths of nature as romantic retreats are also set out for all to see. Representations of famous cave landscapes offered romantic backdrops to flights of the soul by men and women of the 18 th and 19 th centuries. In the 18 th century, mine engineering and scientific geology became exemplary projects of the Enlightenment, ones that went on to assume dimensions that had been unattained until them by any such secular approaches to the underworld. Even the early 20 th century witnessed the design of artistic projects such as the one that imagined a tower of knowledge insinuating itself into the Earth’s core. The conquest of the underworld and the undersea domain continued to be regarded as heroic undertakings in progressive visions driven by faith in technology. Objects from private and public collections, artistic projects as well as multimedia installations document the history of this culture of the underworld and the human fascination with it, and which is also being staged in rock-hard, real- life realms within the Linz city limits during the summer of 2008. Visitors will be able to experience these technical and romantic visions, horrifying images of social descent as well as the mythical power of subterranean worlds up- close-and-personal in the OK’s exhibition spaces. Upon entering the Museum of the Underworlds, one is immediately confronted by a wall-mounted artwork by Markus Pillhofer, who is also responsible for the design of the museum’s other rooms. This crooked, tilted “countervailing object” closes off a long, narrow passageway and, at the same time, provides entree to the subterranean domains on exhibit. The Museum of the Underworlds undertakes a fundamental investigation of the significance of the spaces of the imagination that, although situated at such close proximity, are not so easily accessible as one might think. The various different finds discovered during the process of shedding light on this history of fascination document the significance of the underworld as a central point of orientation in our understanding of the world. Curator: Brigitte Felderer Exhibition Designer: Markus Pillhofer TIEFENRAUSCH MONDAY READINGS with Brigitte Felderer “Let us descend to the blind world.” The Imaginary Topography of the Underworld Monday, June 30, 2008, 8 PM, OK 2/10 TIEFENRAUSCH ____________________________________________________________________________________ _________ Room 1 PURIFICATION Pipilotti Rist: “Selfless In The Bath Of Lava” 1994 LCD monitor flush-mounted in the floor, playback device, sound system Director, film editor, camerawoman, cast: Pipilotti Rist; Sound: Peter Bräker Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Zurich London At first glance, one sees nothing, but then one hears a female voice loudly calling out: “I am a worm and you, you are a flower. You would have done everything better. Excuse me. Help me.” The monitor flush-mounted in the floor is quickly found; it shows the artist Pipilotti Rist. She desperately reaches out her arms to the audience like in old- fashioned depictions of sinners in purgatory. The arms outstretched above in these images signify that, once purification has been completed, there is still the prospect of attaining paradise. Room 2 IMAGES OF HELL: Christianity’s Hell has long since ceased to be the only underworld that confronts us. In the middle of this space, there’s a long, narrow display case containing historical Krampus cards. These demons that so impudently and lasciviously leap out at us also personify a Panopticon of unspoken desires, fantasies, fears and feelings of guilt that seem to be emanating directly from Hell. Since the advent of the Enlightenment, Hell is no longer just a terror-filled Christian fantasy; it has established itself in the mythological inner worlds of a rationalist here and there as well. Room 3 DESCENT: Ore Strata and Aragonite Crystals: Mine engineering, understanding the history of the Earth, new methods of extracting and processing ore are metaphors as well as the contents of a process of enlightenment. Nevertheless, amidst the development of rational approaches to the economic viability and efficient organization of the mining and smelting industry, magical and mythological forms of dealing with nature have lived on. The “miracle stratum” from the Erzberg iron mine complex in the Austrian Province of Styria that’s on display here, its various depictions, the legend of its discovery in 1669 and its significance for the history of iron mining in Erzberg—almost magical, as it were—attest to this ambivalence. Room 4 Plan the Impossible: In the history of the symbolism of humanity’s seizure of power over the Earth, the mine can be described as the “inverted Tower of Babel.” Such a structure of planetary dominion was planned in 1941 by Dutch architect and modernist Henricus Theodorus Wijdefeld, who designed a subterranean tower that was to reach all the way to the center of the Earth and would bring together the world’s foremost scientists to study the planet’s interior. Artist Florian Bettel’s project about an 1874 underground interment system shows that even amidst the technical fascination of the 19 th century, state-of-the-art technology was deployed to maintain the ancient order separating the great beyond from everyday life on this mortal coil. Room 5 EXIT The Shaft of Babel: The artist excavates a shaft into the ground below his studio. The material that he extracts in doing so fills the studio and, in order to create the necessary space in there, the artist seals up the shaft again. The excavated earth corresponds to the volume of the studio space. The apparent escape tunnel on which the artist had labored in secret is filled up. There is no escape from the studio. On one hand, among European historians of ideas, the process of digging below the surface is a familiar metaphor for the search to attain insights; on the other hand, the withdrawal into the interior of the Earth stands for flight into a countervailing world, a place governed by a set of rules completely different from the generally accepted conditions of reality. 3/10 TIEFENRAUSCH ____________________________________________________________________________________ _________ Hans Schabus Astronaut 2002 Video on DVD, 7 minutes 32 seconds The artist / Engholm Engelhorn Galerie The psychonaut expands and digs through the underground. The unlit depths are a spooky realm, shadowy and brachiated; they enclose and oppose the individual, who becomes more relative with each stab of the shovel. The earthy depths come across as a utopian space but as a paradox too—after all, they’re also associated with the concept of weightlessness and boundlessness. But to an even greater extent, the underworld delivers an explanatory model for the stratification of the psyche—the encounter with mentality and the initiation into its secrets demand years of work on the “material resistance” of the consciousness.