Anja Manfredi (born 1978 in Lienz, lives and works in Vienna) shows her first institutional solo exhibition in Vienna in spring 2023 at the tresor of the Bank Austria Kunstforum. The project is titled ATLAS: On the one hand, Aby Warburg's image atlas Mnemosyne has been an important frame of reference for Anja Manfredi's artistic work for many years. On the other hand, the figure of Atlas, the world's bearer, also forms a motivic connection; for example, a golden sphere (designed by architect Gustav Peichl) hovers above the entrance portal of the Kunstforum, which can be understood as an abstraction of the mythological figure and at the same time the oldest symbol for space itself.

By means of analog photography, Anja Manfredi embarks on an artistic search for traces, which leads her to hidden or overlooked places in Vienna, for example when she puts female load carriers, the caryatids, who are visible on numerous facades, into picture. But her ATLAS research also took her to much more remote places, such as the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, where the artist photographed and brought back a stone that serves as a template and tool for works subsequently created in the studio. The strong conceptual aspect that Anja Manfredis pursues in her artistic work will be highlighted for the first time in the exhibition. At the same time, the project also has a site-specific claim: the facade of the Kunstforum enters into a dialogue with surrounding architecture, artworks and buildings. Anja Manfredi's visual argument draws attention to the fact that in everyday life we are surrounded by a web of historical and cultural codes and connections to which we (wrongly) pay too little attention.

Anja Manfredi has been the director of the Friedl Kubelka School of Artistic Photography since 2010 and in 2017 received the Outstanding Artist Award for Artistic Photography. 

Curated by Lisa Ortner-Kreil

Opening Wednesday April 26, 2023, 7 p.m.