Luchezar Boyadjiev

Report on residency with quartier 21 – MQ, Vienna / In collaboration with Springerin Magazine; October 1st – December 1st 2006; Studio 513

My residency with quartier 21, in collaboration with Springerin Magazine-Vienna, started from the privileged position I have concerning the art scene in Vienna. In my professional practice since 1991 I have had many occasions to work in Austria and Vienna in particular, to collaborate on a number of occasions with Austrian institutions, groups, and individuals; to exhibit and to be part of conferences, etc. That is why I felt privileged not to waste any time on adapting to the open and friendly contemporary art environment in the city. In reality, two months is a relatively short period of time for developing a serious project in an unfamiliar city and surroundings. But because of my background and experience in working with and in Austria, I was able to just go on and continue work on my ongoing cycle of project having to do with the visual interface of the global city of today. 

Thus my project and work in Studio 513 was somehow a smooth progression of previous recent work in the cities of Iasi in Romania, Singapore, Adelaide in Australia, and Hamburg in Germany, etc. This kind of project depends on daily walks along none-preplanned itineraries and taking of hundreds of photographs of city details. Subsequently these photographs are sorted out and few are selected to be used as a source material for the final art work. The aim is to visually detect sights and scenes in the city, Vienna in this case, where some specifically local configuration (of visual and special kind, of architecture and advertisement, for instance) of distinctly global processes is manifested for the eye of the city dweller or an artist like myself.

The final work that I was able to complete while in Vienna is titled "Vienna Con-volution" (2006) and it is a cycle of 32 digital prints on 250 g paper, each one measuring 29.7 x 42 cm. These are combinations of always two photographs taken in completely different parts of town that I have composed together by conceptually “cutting away” the city space in between the actual locations. This procedure conflates the city space thus exposing some (ideally) revealing aspects of the particular way in which the city of Vienna is configuring itself with regard to its visuality – the revealing aspect of these works may have to do with historical layers as well as current realities, but they always are specifically Viennese.

I believe that my time was well spent – creatively productive and rewarding in terms of interaction with my hosts, both professional as well as in general – the staff of the Quartier 21 program, which is extremely helpful, friendly and efficient. That makes the experience of having this residency a particularly meaningful and pleasant event.   

Luchezar Boyadjiev

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