'Halfway House', a Group Show Curated by Julius Pristauz at Exile, Vienna

I love refrigerated food I swear it’s just like a pill can make you feel better can make you feel ill My kitchen usually smells of burnt onions and weed but today one of my room mates cooked fish and the smell makes me sick

My face is the front of shop My face is the real shopfront reminds me of the last time someone called me a copycat honestly I don’t give a fuck

RIP Karl

I <3 YOU MOM

I <3 YOU HALFWAY HOUSE

$$$

I

In criminology, the purpose of a HALFWAY HOUSE is generally considered to be that of allowing people to begin the process of reintegration with society.

Between the recreation of capitalist concepts and treating economic and social necessities, this scenery positions itself as an experiment, shaped by duality.

Spatially separated with slight and divine intersections it looks closer into the overlapping of two aspects in nowadays art world: commerce & community

Multilaterally, the history as well as the coined function and capacity of EXILE, of independent art spaces in general, within their prevailing surroundings, are being addressed.

It should be clear that artworks hold a different responsibility than designed mass products.

Yet, sometimes we find undeniable similarities. The selling of originality and individualistic forms of expression can only be argued when we invade the integrity of the shown works and their authors. We are confronted with a spectrum of commercial co-existence here. Within such an environment each piece starts to blend in while still poetically claiming a title for its own. We’re facing products which through their purchasability can be resocialized. They want to exceed the display that was pushed upon them and create narratives on and for their own. These works are ultimately given a new place in society. But are there also seeds of thought planted with them? Is there space for further ideas to grow?

Without approval, visitors are turned into a performative element enjoying the voyeuristic gaze of outside passengers. Located in a ground level shop front, on the edge of the fancy first district, one finds an exhibited social situation. A similar setup awaits the spectators upstairs, where works are impatiently waiting similarly staged and performative but ready to be looked at.

Besides the more subtle artistic interventions on the ground floor such as the posters that were exclusively commissioned and which can be bought by visitors of every class, the room should further function as a place of exchange and communication. Somehow reminiscent of a youth center or a teenager’s coming of age home, it creates a pseudo-institutional and -intellectual setting for socializing without actually touching what is considered an exhibition space. Especially within commercial spaces, we need to reintroduce discourse and a sense of being there for each other. A lack of moral & financial sustainability within a hypercapitalist system is to be witnessed.

Emphasizing on the mixture of realities and expectations when entering a contemporary art context and the mixture of approaches within EXILE itself, HALFWAY HOUSE is an aim in blurring borders. It offers itself as a seceding act towards the frequently imagined purpose of a gallery space in times of turbo acceleration. Mixed up realms and professions demand a move of repurposing.

Despite solely viewing art as a product we were animated to reflect on how these objects continue to lead people inside a haziness amid the lucid areas of commerce & community.

— Julius Pristauz

II

Recently I was transported to a scene somewhere in the near future, shortly after the end of the first global nanoware and the partition of the world in ghettos controlled by postfacist microenhancement monopolists and retrofacist prepper paramilitaries. Society’s erosion had left only wasteland, sweeping away institutionalized cultural practices and their preceding markets. What was called “contemporary art” beforehand had collapsed to a form of trickster survival practice. This space I found myself in seemed to be a refuge, a non-site of precarious community without any fixed qualities besides shared desperation and some collective comfort found in pharmacological self-defense. ⠀

Confusion overwhelmed me, I felt strangely old and at the same time thrown into a hallucinatory teenage heterotopia. Did I reach the next level? Or was it all just a cynical joke? The futility of the question made me laugh. I decided that it wasn’t about the red or the blue pill but about the orange one that I found in a cupboard upstairs. The interregnum had fallen, “the old” had decomposed, the descendants of monsters had established their neofeudal reign. Now it was all about the right equipment. Deal with it, I told myself, and better get dressed accordingly.

— Nada Schoer