Secession
Vienna, Austria
27 June – 1 September 2019
The New Zealand-born artist Fiona Connor makes sculptural installations in which she replicates objects and structures of everyday life. Her recreations of bulletin boards, drinking fountains, furniture, and doors not only draw attention to these widely overlooked items and their forms, they also reconstruct the histories and micro-economies of communities. Many of her works respond to the infrastructure of the places and environments where she exhibits them, uncovering the underlying mechanisms that may inform our interactions with art and art institutions. The sculptures reveal the artist’s deep curiosity about how things are made. They play with the ambiguity of the handmade and the manufactured, as well as with the boundaries of an art object.
For her exhibition at the Secession, #8, Closed for Installation, Sequence of Events, Connor has developed a body of work that comprises 23 bronze objects that resemble tools commonly used in the installation process of an exhibition: a measuring tape, ruler, pencil, dolly, etc. The sculptures work with the rules of a certain period of labour and maintenance, replicating tools that look very similar all around the world and are usually out of sight at the opening of the exhibition.
In the framework of Connor’s exhibition, the artist was also realizing two projects outside of the Secession: One at Karl-Marx-Hof, a municipal housing complex, where she made a copy of a community bulletin board and relocated it for the duration of the show to a private apartment. The other one is to permanently exchange a standard door from another social housing project in Vienna with a door from a house in Los Angeles.