Jakob Lena Knebl and Markus Pires Mata’s collaborative work is a tableau vivant of muscular bodies juxtaposed with modernist objects and accompanied by a layer of seductive, uncanny sound. Reacting to the Historicist architecture of the Blauer Salon, this mash-up of references is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story There Are More Things, in which modernist furniture comes alive in a mysterious house. Based on this strange and incongruous scene, Knebl and Pires Mata create a disconcerting scenography of bodybuilders’ limbs becoming sculptures and sculptures coming alive. Together they create a living image of hedonism in all its ambivalence, thus revealing the mechanisms of seduction and paradoxes of desire that drive the rise and fall of many a subcultural style or identity. The desire to break taboos creates radical elements that ossify as clichés once they hit the mainstream.

Performance: Rudolf Stübler, Kevin Stütz, Lara Tasharofi, Jekaterina Übelacker, and Stefan Wottawa
Bodypainting: Denise Kottlett, Jolanda Resch

Link

https://2019.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/artists/428/jakob-lena-knebl-and-markus-pires-mata