LUKAS HEISTINGER & BERNHARD GARNICNIG "AAAA" 📷

Saturday, September 28, 2019 3:00 PM 15:00
Sunday, October 6, 2019 4:30 PM 16:30

f.eks., Aalborg Locations around Aalborg Denmark (map)

Google Calendar ICS

Lukas Heistinger og Bernhard Garnicnig. Photo: Niels Fabæk.

Press Release, September 2019

AAAA
by Lukas Heistinger and Bernhard Garnicnig

A Research Process
Gathering Around the Fire
A Sailboat Adventure
Culminating in a Ceremony…

f.eks. warmly invites you to AAAA an event-based public artwork initiated by Lukas Heistinger and Bernhard Garnicnig. AAAA seeks to encourage interactions between the artistic, public, corporate, and government interests surrounding Aalborg’s transformation from an industrial to a cultural city.

Through a combination of private conversations and public events the artists’ aim is to rethink the parts art can play in the future contexts of the city. By applying a macro-perspective on the artist’s role in social life they will introduce a roaming performative installation at locations such as a backyard villa house, a sailing club, harbor front lots, and a decommissioned watchtower. AAAA will invite local artists, developers, government officials, and publics into the project. Based on these interactions, the project is trying to structure and contextualize varying interests into art and culture. After a collective sailboat voyage across the Limfjord, a final ‘Policy Transformation Proposal’ will be handed over to the local government in a ceremony at the Aalborg harbor front. The public will be invited to join this celebratory boat ride sailing toward Policy Transformation together.

AAAA (which stands for AAlborg Anti-Artwashing) is a project rooted in creating a responsible long-term vision for art and culture in the city of Aalborg. AAAA seeks to explore how to (re)define the different roles of artistic practice for government, and how to best support, protect, and communicate them. By referring to the harbor history and local landmarks to help create new images and language, the artists are seeking to rethink the role art can play in cities, institutions, and urban transformation processes.

Open Forum, Casa Anne Maries vej. Photo: Bernhard Garnicnig.

Open Forum, Casa Anne Maries vej. Photo: Niels Fabæk.

Open Forum, Casa Anne Maries vej. Photo: Rikke Ehlers Nilsson.

Lukas Heistinger (b. 1987, Vienna, Austria) and Bernhard Garnicnig (b. 1983, Austria) live and work in Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Since realizing a film project together in Brasilia in 2014, they continued collaborating on a number of projects. Using their association, the Artist Project Group - an allusion to the radical 1970s collective Artist Placement Group, operating in Britain during the mediated collapse of the National industries – as a production platform, they are spinning new and unexpected narratives on concepts like products & performance, culture & capital, and markets & merchandise.

In 2015, they founded the artist label Supergood and began integrating commercial practices into their work. They ran a concept store in Vienna for several months selling different interpretations of ‘superfood’ to hype audiences, while hosting other performers, artists, and researchers. In 2018, they fronted a major retrospective by Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa at the MAAT, Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia in Lisbon employing their brand image and picking up de Sousa’s use of posters to seed political unrest. Now they are using their newly discovered roles as service providers for an ever-expanding industry of cultural institutions and are in the process of developing a mobile application called Artist Partner Service to expand practically into the quest of how artistic work can be newly interpreted and valorized.

f.eks. is a roaming, non-profit, artist-run platform that makes contemporary art events in a changing constellation of spaces and contexts in the city of Aalborg. At these sites, f.eks. invites artists to make temporary pop-up events including discussions, performances, readings, screenings, participatory installations, and other forms of temporary engagements.

f.eks. seeks to create social, critical, and experimental art projects by inviting artists that have collective, collaborative, research and cooperative practices to engage with wider audiences during their micro exhibition periods. This is part of a broader aim to experiment with sustainable models of artistic organization, via novel presentation formats, while generating new publics along the way.

Sailing Ceremony, Departure, Schooner MAJA. Photo: Niels Fabæk.

f.eks. is kindly sponsored by the Danish Arts Foundation, Aalborg Municipality, and Aalborg Arts Foundation. This project is supported by Stigsborg P/S, Aalborg Port Logistics A/S, Aalborg Events, the schooner MAJA, and Casa Anne Maries Vej.

Introductory Event, Saturday, 28th September:
Open Forum - Policy Transformation, from 3 - 5 pm.
Casa Anne Maries Vej, Anne Maries Vej 22, 9000 Aalborg.

Main Event, Sunday, 6th October:
Sailing Ceremony, from 1:30 - 4:30 pm.
Stigsborg, Stigsborg Brygge 5, 9400 Nørresundby.
*The Sailboat Ride is free of admission and open to the public
(we board at Stigsborg at 2 pm. and dock near the Utzon Center at 4 pm).