For the second event in this year’s Tuesday@Secession series, we cordially invite you to an evening of community in the Secession’s garden. Look forward to contributions by [M] Dudeck, Alice Gorman & Ralo Mayer and Christian Hutzinger.

[M] Dudeck, Alice Gorman & Ralo Mayer

Un·Earthing a Space Miner’s Dream and the Ruins of Xenoarchaeology

In 2015, the U.S. passed a law that explicitly allowed private companies to commercially exploit natural resources on other celestial bodies, translating Space Mining from Science Fiction into legislation. In his ongoing performative research on un·Earthing, Ralo Mayer approaches these narrative and economic speculations through meteorites, pharmacology and initiations.

[M] Dudeck explores the religious implications of ancient astronaut theory, archaeology as an origin myth generator, and the role played by the megalithic imagination in art and science fiction. They excavate the consequences of alien archaeology on space settlement projects, and how finding interplanetary ruins might reshape the religious imagination.

Alice Gorman joins the discussion from the perspective of her research on the archaeology and heritage of space exploration, including space junk, planetary landing sites, off-earth mining, and space habitats.

The evening includes a screening of Joseph Popper’s short film Clear Ideas, which collages dreams of spaceflight with nightmares of earthly collapse over otherworldly landscapes.

Christian Hutzinger

Sentimental Journey

In the summer of 1990, as Christian Hutzinger was traveling in the U.S. with his family, he made ephemeral little installations in their motel rooms. The photographs of these simple interventions constitute a documentary record and are intended as a kind of “parallel voyage” alongside their actual trip, which included visits to sights like the Grand Canyon. Inspired by the monotonous palette and materiality of the mid-priced motels, the installations were made with the most basic of means: scissors and adhesive foil. The motif of the silhouettes, produced by folding the material twice, is a precise yet playfully humorous form sustained by an organic principle that underlies Hutzinger’s entire oeuvre.

In 1992, as part of the museum in progress’s project “Wandzeitung,” a selection of the photographs of the motel-room installations was displayed under the title “Sentimental Journey” in a slide show projected from the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna onto the fire wall of the neighboring University of Applied Arts for fourteen nights. They are now shown again for the first time in over thirty years.

Biography

[M] Dudeck is an artist and cultural engineer who invents their own queer religion as art.

Ralo Mayer is an artist and filmmaker who likes research, storytelling, and licking meteorites.

Alice Gorman, also known as Dr Space Junk, researches the archaeological record of humans in outer space.

Christian Hutzinger was born in Vienna in 1966 and grew up in Mödling, Old Greenwich, Conn., and Ebensee am Traunsee. He studied with Adolf Frohner at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1987 until 1991. Working with painting, collage, drawing, and site- or room-specific ideas, he often focuses his creative energies on murals. His art has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Austria and abroad including, recently, at the International Biennial of Painting in Chișinău, Moldova. His most recent publication is the book November (Sammlung Burghardt / Edition Kunst|Agentur), which contains a series of thirty collages and a contribution by the writer Barbara Zeman.

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Curated by Christian Lübbert