Permanent Installation
Opening, April 8, 2025, 6 pm
Sophie Dvořák’s artworks have one thing in common: her drawings, collages, and objects are collections. Artistic reconfigurations or reassemblages of information, data, and material. Data material that is already circulating in our world in a processed form, be it as maps, encyclopedias, or mythological narratives, and as such become interpretation tools. The artist confronts this data material with questions of spatial relationships and aesthetic potentials. The artistic intervention SYNTAX is the product of Dvořák’s mapping of a special place, a transitory space, at the Lakeside Science & Technology Park. But these enhancements to the entrance areas on a level of the newly built parking garage are not just an aesthetic intervention, they rather serve as an abstract description of a place, at the very place being described. Dvořák has translated a vocabulary of signs she found on the parking deck—informal markings like graffiti, official signs such as fire extinguishers boxes or escape route plans—into tangible color palettes and symbols that now await inspection on the concrete walls like cartographic legends, interpretation tools. The colors and shapes of the interior, the architecture and its provisions for orientation, the colors and shapes of the outer space, the view to the surrounding nature with its forests and the nearby lake, become a commentary on the Technology Park itself.
For the information condensed by Dvořák testifies, if nothing else, to how arbitrary the relationship is between the sign and the signified, between conventional abstraction and the world or reality. Through her conceptual, spatial, and aesthetic measurement of such relations, the artist exposes the leeway in the interpretative scope of data, data about the world. By annotating a place with its own formal vocabulary and on the very place, the artist creates a self-reflexive loop of observation and perception. Here we find a glitch that allows passersby—en passant—to have an aesthetic experience and—in pausing—to observe their own observations: What am I actually seeing here? What is this legend trying to tell me? What sort of place am I at in the moment? The relationships between the colors and symbols employed by Dvořák and their immediate (spatial) surroundings are sometimes more obvious, sometimes rather far-fetched. The artist exploits the very interpretative scope she has created.
The artist and art historian Hans Dieter Huber describes measuring as an ambivalent process that “divides the world into two zones, a measured one and one that does the measuring,” whereby “the latter part, which does the measuring, cannot in turn itself be measured.”* In SYNTAX, Sophie Dvořák’s artistic reflection introduces a second-order observation using scientific means and methods—or at least the potential of such a form of simultaneous reflection and self-reflection. “That is the paradox and at the same time the presumption of measurement,” says Huber about the blindness that is inscribed in even the most exact measuring process, in every precise scientific operation: “A measurement is a form that always has two sides, i.e. a measured inside and an unmeasured outside. The unmeasured outside is the point where the world disappears, where it becomes invisible, unobservable, concealed, latent and excluded.”** With her concentrated interplay of forms and colors, the artist makes this unobservability observable by keeping both the first and second order, the inside and outside of the measurement, in suspense.
* Hans Dieter Huber, “Presumptuous claims,” in Measuring the World. Heterotopias and Knowledge Spaces in Art, ed. Katrin Bucher Trantow and Peter Pakesch, exh. cat. Kunsthaus Graz (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), 224–233, here: 225.
** Huber.
Sophie Dvořák (b. 1978 in Austria) lives and works in Vienna.
www.sophiedvorak.net
