Vienna. It was warmer than usual at this year’s 8th Sharjah Biennale thanks to Danish artist Tue Greenfort. His artistic contribution involved turning the thermostats on the air-conditioning in the exhibition rooms, which usually always runs at full blast, down two degrees and then being paid a sum amounting to the energy saved. His exhibition in the Secession now references the project’s »sustainability«: a document is displayed testifying that Tue Greenfort has purchased several hectares of rain forest with the profits from this minimal intervention. In the cabinet of graphic art, where an air-conditioning device and a certificate bear witness to his action-oriented ideas to redistribute resources, he also addresses the consequences of the prevailing ecological imbalance: a table enumerates a long list of butterfly species threatened by extinction, whilst in a showcase he presents the Cabbage White, indigenous to Europe and already categorised as a pest. The finishing touch to the work, conceived specially for Vienna by the artist, is added by number of impromptu performances; in each, a staff member from Vienna’s butterfly house presents a live exemplar of the exotic species bred there.
During a guided tour through the exhibition, the fact that the temperature of the room has to be raised artificially again during the performance brings the artist back to the question of sustainability once more; he is well aware that energy is being wasted again here, but he is not trying after all to place himself outside of the global ecological context, but much more to attain greater awareness of these issues himself.
Various experts assist him in this endeavour, for example a chemist from Vienna’s Technical University, with whom he realised one of his works: it refers to an experiment from the 1960s in which American scientists tried to extract protein from petroleum.
In contrast to this work, in which the artist also explores the failed feasibility fantasies of the research world, his glass »Medusas« do not reveal much in terms of consciousness-raising: designed in conjunction with Venetian glass-blowers, they are certainly very attractive to look at; however merely drawing attention to the heightened prevalence of jellyfish in the Adriatic, a phenomenon that has been the subject of exhaustive media coverage, is probably not going to have a particularly durable effect on the problem.
In contrast, his concrete site-specific interventions and experimental proposals for action, which do not transfer media proclamations of catastrophe quite so directly to the exhibition space, prove to be much more intriguing, as can be seen at present in the group exhibition »Nachvollziehungsangebote« in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse.
In the context of this exhibition curated by Sophie Goltz and Vera Tollmann, Tue Greenfort offers an alternative which is indeed not quite as spectacular as his originally much more ambitious plan; but the reasons why the installation of a rain water toilet failed lead us to consider our own wasteful approach to water as a resource, as well as the technological and bureaucratic obstacles that have apparently impeded not just Greenfort’s attempt to devise an approach to sustainability that certainly seems to make sense but also efforts by other artists. In implementing her project »A Potato Perspective On Diversity«, Aasa Sonjasdotter also found herself confronted with EU directives which in the interests of allegedly fair competition prohibit cultivation of »non-EU-registered« but highly resistant potato varieties and Kristina Leko has addressed the impact of the EU’s dubious policy on food too. For her project »On Milk and People« the artist talked to Hungarian and Croatian farmers and asked them about their day-to-day lives and the consequences of the monopolistic strategies of large corporate groups promoted by EU policy.
The geopolitical connections revealed by the video project »Black Sea Files / B-Zone« are not covered in such detail in the media: here Ursula Biemann sheds light on the ecological and geopolitical consequences of a giant pipeline project, which is meant to link the Caspian Sea with the Mediterranean, and in her extensive collection of materials (including historical data, interviews with sex workers, recordings of clashes reminiscent of warfare in instances of compulsory resettlement) also highlights the position she adopted herself as an »embedded artist«.
Whilst Biemann’s video convinces us indirectly that politicians and experts from industrialised nations cannot be the only ones held to be competent to resolve the devastating consequences of this seemingly »sustainable development«, Nils Norman and René Lück address this fact directly in their works: Norman took the name »Ronald Reagan« as a symbol of conscious foiling of »sustainable« policy based on common sense; his first official act on becoming president was to have the solar panels that had been installed on the White House by Jimmy Carter taken down again, and Lück presents a model of a »solar oven«, used since 1972 in the Pyrenees in the south of France exclusively to research alternative energies.
In all this, the exhibition does not offer any really new options for action when dealing with acute problems of environmental protection; that being said, however, it does once again set centre-stage those ecological questions that have degenerated into mere justification for new power struggles under the buzzword of »sustainable development«.
Translated by Helen Ferguson