In Person: Josef Dabernig

Shortly after his 70th birthday, we celebrate Austrian artist Josef Dabernig with a comprehensive survey of his filmic oeuvre, supplemented by a *carte blanche* selection and insights into his work in other disciplines—including readings and slide projections. While the 22 short films Dabernig has created since the mid-1990s—a handful in collaboration with other artists—represent the best-known aspect of his output through their presence at festivals and in exhibition spaces, they are part of a cross-media body of work. This multidisciplinary nature was already highlighted in the subtitle of the first monograph dedicated to him: *Film, Photo, Text, Object, Building*. Dabernig arrived in Vienna in 1975 to study sculpture, and his work with moving images represents a continuation of that practice through “spatial sculptures.” Yet, for all their structural clarity, these films are also narrative films in the truest sense: not merely abstract conceptual art, but tragicomic miniatures. With unmistakable laconic wit, Dabernig presents situations steeped in absurd humor and melancholy; these are enriched by biographical references and explore interests ranging from architecture to desserts.

Dabernig’s origins in the Carinthian market town of Kötschach-Mauthen—located near the Italian and Slovenian (then Yugoslav) borders—can also be viewed as the starting point for the geographical traces found in his work. Selected locations across Eastern Europe, Austria, and Italy serve as fertile settings for his studies of existence in a (post)modern world that frequently engenders alienation and emptiness. The protagonists have generally settled into everyday routines; their activities and movements become almost ritualistic acts. A sense of loneliness pervades their togetherness; while interaction exists, there is no communication in the conventional sense. Consequently, the films often remain wordless or are counterpointed by external texts—such as when the proletarian dreariness in the imagery of the gambling-themed *Herna* (2010) clashes with a high-bourgeois literary radio play by Bruno Pelladini. Dabernig’s early, successful “anti-football film” *Wisla* (1995) already heightened its humor through the contrast between a coach’s solitary hand-signal instructions in an empty Polish stadium and the loud Italian football fans on the soundtrack. Since *Rosa coeli* (2004), he has collaborated with sound designer Michael Palm to meticulously construct acoustic spaces—comprising sounds, speech, and a wide variety of music—that enter into a dialectical relationship with the visuals: sometimes aligning with the images, at other times working against them.

Dialectics is, in fact, a key concept for Dabernig’s body of work. Its tonal range extends from a pleasant melancholy to an entertaining eeriness, yet—despite this narrative diversity—one can discern almost monomaniacal predilections: recurring themes include films about families, cars, hotels, landscapes, and work (as well as leisure), often overlapping—as demonstrated with crystalline precision in the family constellation of *Hotel Roccalba* (2008). (Christoph Huber)

In the presence of Josef Dabernig

In cooperation with sixpackfilm and the Kontakt Collection (The Kontakt Collection is an independent, non-profit association based in Vienna. Its purpose is to support and promote art from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.)