Peter Friedl: workshop with residency 2009

As the master for the spring workshop 2009 the Foundation has selected Peter Friedl (Oberneukirchen, 1960), Austrian artist known for his versatile search and certainly one of the most interesting and sofisticated personality of his generation.

Peter Friedl (Oberneukirchen, 1960) uses a personal artistic grammar to investigate the types and conditions of representation and to generate a progressive and radical criticism of form. He employs a wide range of techniques: drawings, photos, video, installation, and text. Particularly interested in their political and discursive meaning, Friedl juxtaposes them in order to critique contemporary strategies of making art and inquire into a wide range of social issues.
In fact, his work highlights the points of contact between aesthetic awareness and political conscience by tracing, or tracking, their mutual relations within the narratives and mythologies that define them. Stateless artist and traveler by vocation, Friedl works on the boundary between anthropology and history. Interested in social history, biography, and permanent displacement, he is always seeking to document and decolonize the imagination. His works are, therefore, real paradoxes, hovering between vision and speech. They are often microscopic stages or representations of acts missed. His projects present, finally, aesthetic models for disarming configurations of power around us.
Peter Friedl has had exhibitions in museums and public and private institutions throughout the world. A large body of criticism has also been devoted to his work in numerous theoretical magazines and books. To name only a few off his exhibitions, we mention the extensive exhibition organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2006 and the retrospective organized jointly by Miami Art Central/Miami Art Museum and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille. In addition two recent solo shows were held at the Kunsthalle Basel and all’Extra City to Antwerp. He has participated in Documenta X (1997), Documenta 12 (2007), the Biennale di Venezia 48 (1999), the Berlin Biennale (2004), Seville (2006), Gwangju (2008), Sao Paulo (2008) and Manifesta (2008).