exhibitions
CARREFOUR DES POSSIBLES V: PASSAGE
Farah Khelil & Vanja Krajnc
06/09 – 05/11/2022 extended to 12/11/2022
curated by Christine Bruckbauer and Sibylle Omlin
Part I @ Parallel Vienna: 06/09 – 11/09/2022
Semmelweisklinik, room B001, Hockegasse 37, 1180 Vienna
Part II @ philomena+: 17/09 – 12/11/2022
Opening: Fri, 16/09/2022, 6:00 pm
Finissage: Sat, 12/11/2022, 5:00 pm
philomena+ project room and front garden, Heinestraße 40, 1020 Vienna, We-Fr 3–7 pm, Sa 3–6 pm
Farah Khelil and Vanja Krajnc, Passage, 2022, oil pastel on cyanotype, © the artists.
Nature is a central theme in the works of Farah Khelil (*1980 in Tunis) and Vanja Krajnc (*1985 in Tyrol). Farah Khelil’s postcolonial research on the palm and the eucalyptus tree leads to conceptual installations. Symbolic and animistic narratives from mountainous valleys are found in Vanja Krajnc’s (glass) paintings.
In their joint exhibition for Carrefour des Possibles V, they create a “Passage” between times and different narrations. During the exhibition period Vanja Krajnc will work on an outdoor painting, which is placed under the big chestnut tree in front of philomena+. Farah Khelil invites visitors to stitch on her already started embroidery picture.
Carrefour des Possibles is an annual residency and exhibition program established in 2018, in collaboration with La Boîte Tunis. Each time, an artist from Tunis is matched with an artist from Vienna. The newly formed duos are invited to present the philomena+ project statement at Parallel Vienna and at the same time to conceive an exhibition for the space in Heinestraße 40.
artists
Farah Khelil (*1980 in Carthage/Tunis, lives and works in Paris) studied at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and holds a PhD in Arts and Art Sciences from the École des Arts de la Sorbonne in Paris. As a predominantly conceptual artist, she reassembles texts, images and objects in installative arrangements to reconfigure their meaning. Her relationship to art through writing, Arabic and Latin, photographic reproduction of the everyday and familial environment leads her to question the status of images and the devices of transmission and mediation.
VANJA KRAJNC
Vanja Krajnc (*1985 in Rum/Tyrol, lives and works in Vienna) studied Fine Arts at the Art University Linz (Ursula Hübner). Her work often deals with healing plants and the animistic symbols of nature, which she translates into large-scale paintings and drawings. Objects and diary-like booklets on the phenomena of experiencing nature also characterise her work.
curators
Freelance curator, editor and art writer CHRISTINE BRUCKBAUER has lived and worked in Pakistan and in Tunisia for over 15 years. After returning to Austria, she founded philomena+ in 2016 together with Negar Hakim, a platform for artistic collaboration between artists from West Asia, North Africa and Austria. In the context of the major political and social upheavals in the Arab region, her work developed a focus on socially engaged art that prefers to act participatively in public spaces.
SIBYLLE OMLIN
Sibylle Omlin is author and curator of numerous exhibitions and publications on art in public space, landscape and social contexts, painting, oral history and performance. Since 1991 she has worked as an art journalist, lecturer in art theory, researcher (for the University of Zurich, Zurich University of the Arts, University of Konstanz, among others). From 1996 to 2001 she was an editorial assistant at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2001-2009 professor at the Institute of Art at the HGK Basel of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (head of the institute), 2009-2017 director of the ECAV Sierre (Ecole cantonale d'art du Valais, today EDHEA). Sibylle Omlin is a member of AICA and A*dS.
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