Catalogue > At random

A moving image. And a story about portrait-paintings being tired of exhausted museum visitors. (production note) Over the entrance of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence hangs a digital display indicating the amount of time visitors still have to wait in line. In the high season this can be up to four hours. Still, the majority, after entering the museum, immediately begin to hurry, checking off the highlights as fast as they can. The average museum visitor, according to the hypothesis Reinhold Bidner proceeds from, spends all of six seconds looking at individual paintings. In his video In Transit Bidner takes up this phenomenon. At first, there?s a painting on the wall and a man sitting in front of it, apparently resting his legs. The camera slowly zooms into the painting until the surrounding space disappears?and it begins to move: The image of a girl by French Classicist William-Adolphe Bouguereau transforms into Rubens? portrait of his daughter, Caravaggio?s sickly Bacchus, the latter?s head of Medusa, and numerous other works from the history of art. Finally, Bouguereau?s girl reappears, smiling as she peers from the painting, the camera moves away and films the?now different?surroundings. The final shot is of a yawning woman. During this virtual museum tour the painting is covered by a veil of drops that reflect the movements of Louvre visitors, who are both tired and hectic. Through this formal choice Bidner keeps the viewer at a distance, while at the same time adding a second level: that of the museum visitors who, due to their exhaustion, see nothing. Together with Richard Eigner, who made the swelling and diminishing soundtrack, Reinhold Bidner successfully created a sensitive study on human behavior in the museum of the 21st century. The audience is invited to take a more intensive and concentrated look at art. (Nina Schedlmayer)

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, Lida Abdul resides there now. She lived in Germany and India as a refugee when she was forced to leave Afghanistan after the former-Soviet invasion. Her work fuses the tropes of Western formalism with the numerous aesthetic traditions ?Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan and nomadic? that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture. She has produced work in many media including video, film, photography, installation and live performance. Her most recent work has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2005, São Paulo Biennial 2006, Gwanju Biennial 2006, Moscow Biennial 2007, Sharjah Biennial 2007, Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Vienna, Ok Centrum, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Tate Modern, Moma NY, National Museum of Kabul, Netherlands and Miami Central, ICA London, ZKM, Capc Bordeaux, CAC Centre d?Art Contemporain de Bretigny, and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. This coming year she has solo exhibition at Indianapolis Museum (IMA) and Smithsonian at Sackler galleries.