Werner Schrödl (b. in 1971 in Attnang-Puchheim, lives and works in Vienna) sees photography as a medium that unnerves and manipulates our visual habits and changes our view of perceived reality. The photographic print is not a purely objective window onto the age, freeze-framed in time – “this is how it was,” according to Roland Barthes – but a construed situation of what is possible. Moments of irritating, enigmatic, even eerie elements unfold – they are pictorial spaces full of mystical atmosphere. In doing so Schrödl does not in any way use fictional or surreal motifs and narrative strands, but creates everything from the reality around him. With great elaboration he arranges scenarios that are recorded on film or photograph. They are always interventions into interior or exterior spaces, for instance when he manipulates the forest silhouette by lengthening the trees, or hems in a monumental balloon in the former concourse of the Vienna Südbahnhof (South Railway Station). A sculptural quality always sounds an overriding note here, even if only temporarily limited, as when he lengthened the trees that fell as victims of a gale. In the current work series it is the all-embracing light that directs the scenario, transforming far-reaching stretches of countryside, historical architecture and persons and creating a sensation hovering between dream and reality.

Curator: Florian Steininger