Follow Up: Verena Tscherner

Verena Tscherner experiments with the idea of the vacuum as a way to capture a moment, as a delay of decay, as ‘holding one‘s breath.' The aspects of air and vacuum are increasingly gaining new, expanded meanings in her artistic process. Inhale. deflate marked the beginning of her engagement with the genre of sculpture and spatial installation. In her diploma thesis entangle. deflate she combined 3D-printed objects with a large-scale deflateable and a sound installation. This large-scale deflateable is sculpturally placed in the space. It takes on an organic character as air is repeatedly added or removed from it using a timer.

Dear Verena, tell us briefly what you have been working on?

I produced a new installation for my exhibition at Frau* schafft Raum. I experimented with different breathing patterns of the deflateables. At the same time, I worked further with directional speakers and tried different texts, voices, atmospherical sounds and music to see how these sounds may alter the room they are placed in. I also brought my first deflateable inhale. deflate and set it up at my temporary studio at AIL.

I have been working on a lot. And maybe not much at the same time. Put a lot of effort in many different things. Finishing them all together to one new art piece: detach. deflate. Shown at Frau* schafft Raum afterwards for over three months.

How is the project progressing now?

The project is finished with the exhibition at Frau* schafft Raum. The reception of the audience was as empowering as the work itself was intended to be. It will be exhibited again this year in the LEMU (Museum Langenzersdorf, NÖ) in a group exhibition of the Bildhauer:innen Verband Österreich.

What has changed over the course of the residency, what processes has been influenced?

To imagine big installations was definitely inspired by the residency, alone because I had such a big studio space. It was nice to fill the space with all my ideas.

What does interdisciplinary work mean to you? To what extent does it come into play in your work, why?

Interdisciplinarity is a diverse form of mixing media in a honest and indeed complex way. It is more about finding the right media / or mediums for the topic and letting the artwork intuitively come to life, and see what it requests and how it may manifest itself. It’s a playful form of experimentation, that may resonate on several levels and on multiple layers with the observer.

Were there any encounters or aha experiences that inspired you during your residency? Can you briefly describe them?

Yes there were quite a few I have to say. I especially want to mention the visit from Petra Gruber from the Architecture Department of the Angewandte. I invited her for feedback on my work, as she has never seen any or my artworks so far. I was really curious to meet her and I fully enjoyed the conversation we had about so many things. I felt really inspired and it certainly opened a new perspective to me.

I also enjoyed the visits from two classes. One was my former department, the digital arts class, in the framework of a lecture held by Wolfgang Fiel. Most of the students in this group were quite young and their interest in my way of operating and creating art was truly adorable and also brought me out of my comfort zone, which is always important for any kind of progress.

Later Peter Kozek from the APL (Angewandte Performance Lab) came to visit me with some students as well. This visit was very delightful and charming at the same time. The students were really eager to learn about my work in progress of the project I created and produced during my residency at the AIL.

What happens to the idea of sculpture as a static object when – as in your case – it breathes and moves? Your sculptures deal with the topic of violence against women, i.e. a social problem that usually happens in secret within relationships. What new meanings does this create, especially with regard to empathy?

First of all, the topic is not part of my handwriting. It just happened that my first two big sculptural works dealt with a similar issue. My medium of choice, the so called Deflateables, are breathing objects, that mimic the human breathing patterns.

Therefore it appears that the audience starts to somehow interact / connect intuitively with the sculpture (object) itself and that indeed opens up a place in their consciousness that I would describe as empathy. In my opinion this brings another layer to the work and to art itself. The layer of how to engage and immerse the audience in the created atmosphere of the artwork. The layer of connecting to something more universal, yet being perceived by the individual in their own way.