Johannes Porsch - Tropology
Johannes Porsch
investigates in his artistic practice how certain elements combine to form a structure and how they interact with one another.
Terms like “relation,” “reciprocity,” and “processuality” serve as springboards and premises for his work.
In
installations, sculptural settings, and spatial interventions, as well as publications and exhibition displays, he undertakes
semantic shifts or highlights existing ambiguities in order to use them as design elements in exhibition and publication contexts.
Porsch reflects on underlying methodology, engaging with the techniques of artistic depiction or with reproduction and representation
processes that are not unique to creating art but can also be found in broader social contexts.
“The
concept of artistic research allows me to redefine my own working methods on an ongoing basis,” says the artist of his self-reflexive
field of endeavor, in which he continually analyzes and reviews his own strategies for producing meaning and generating reality.
“Rather than analyzing the concept itself, however, I invoke historical and contemporary artistic positions through a frame
of reference that I deal with in my artistic and curatorial practice as well as in my activities as an author. Science is
not the paradigm I apply. Artistic research includes instead a certain amount of ambivalence, which can only be clarified
through the process of artistic production, meaning the act of creating itself.”
For Kunstraum Lakeside,
Porsch is continuing research whose results he first exhibited in 2017 at the Kunstpavilion Innsbruck under the title “Tropology”.
Tropes are linguistic devices that are used not in their actual sense but figuratively, thus corresponding with Porsch’s methods
of shifting and subverting meanings. What is expressed through tropes is therefore not to be understood literally but rather
in divergence from a set direction or a given path. Tropes are forms of unreality. In their constant twists and turns and
changes of direction, by replacing one frame of reference with another, tropes evade clear semantic determination and undermine
normative patterns and hegemonies.
Johannes Porsch (b. 1970 in Austria) lives and works in Vienna.
Captions
Johannes Porsch, Tropology, 2018
Courtesy of the artist
Johannes Porsch, Tropology, 2018
Events
Opening
08. May 2018 - 19:00
Duration
09. May 2018 - 22. June 2018
Kunstraum Lakeside, Lakeside Science & Technology Park, Lakeside B02, A-9020 Klagenfurt