'VERTRAU MIR' at foundation and Belvedere 21, Vienna

One of the most basic human needs - trust - connects the works of Kareem Lotfy, Evelyn Plaschg, Fabio Santacroce and Anne Schmidt. The exhibition’s title, VERTRAU MIR (Trust me), mediates between trust’s positive dimension, as a friendly invitation, and, on the other hand, its suspicious invasiveness, as a pushy request for granting a leap of faith. The positive aspects of trust develop from it being actively offered and accepted, a process which fosters a sense of interpersonal security. In this way, the negotiation of trust enables and cultivates an invisible contractual cord. Empathy and affection rely on trust and seem impossible without it. But the essence of trust is fragile and can be instrumentalized or abused often too easily. When inverted, trust’s violent dimension enables dependencies and suppression as one of its manifold registers.

A ready-made furniture set, the kind supplied by most home improvement stores, acts as the key element in the unfolding of a domestic mise en scène. Paradoxically, the private realm, a place for recreation and intimacy, is pervaded by violence to the extent of almost no other space. The desire to separate the private realm from the public sphere masks a complex relationship of mutual dependency. In VERTRAU MIR various sorts of decorations demand the superior position within these sets of tension, become reshaped by a layer of sound, and get injured by bodily traces. The inversion of the institutional and the organic intensifies through the bifurcation of the exhibition throughout two venues: foundation and Belvedere 21.