Dorit Margreiter Choy

Dorit Margreiter Choy is an Austrian artist interested in modern architecture, its ideological implications and its relationship to economics and gender roles. Her films, photographs, and objects tell stories of places and landscapes in transformation, with humans as implicit architects of these changes. The works exhibited at Cukrarna Gallery, with their exploratory view of local histories, find a conceptual and material equivalent in the venue’s setting. A mobile hanging in the gallery further emphasises the exhibition’s basic concept: the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space.

The films relate to subjects such as a company building in Zlín in the Czech Republic, a former silver mine in Schwaz in Tyrol, and the Austrian pavilion designed by Josef Hoffmann in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale. As material testimonies to a global history, they reflect the formative phase of capitalism, its global expansion and its consequences. They are micro-histories of extractivism, imperial representation, and global financial circulation, manifested like witnesses in the architecture and the landscape. Dorit Margreiter Choy frames precise views of these relics, their contradictions, consequences, and impact on our present: traces of an industrial past, landscape formations that speak of the burden of the global economy, and an exhibition space that oscillates between a backdrop for national representation and an autonomous architectural monument.

After the First World War, the Czech town of Zlín became the headquarters of Bata, a shoe manufacturer and a globally expanding corporation in the 20th century. At the end of the 1930s, the company had a new administration building erected, a high-rise with a 77-metre tower with an elevator in the middle, which was the fully equipped, mobile office of the company’s CEO. In her film B21 (Director’s Office), Dorit Margreiter Choy shows this panoptic office in eight static views, while conceptualising its architecture: the strip of film is as long as the height of the tower, which corresponds to a projection time of seven minutes.

Silber (Silver) in turn shows abstract landscape shots from Iceland and Schwaz. The camera follows blocks of ice as they break off an Icelandic glacier, slide into a valley and slowly melt on a beach of black lava: a record of climate change in real time. Images of the Tyrolean town of Schwaz, a centre of European silver mining, are superimposed onto this landscape. In the 16th century, the silver thaler produced in Schwaz for international export became a global means of payment. At the same time, entrepreneurs began to sell metal that had not yet been mined in exchange for bills of exchange: the trade in what we today call derivatives began.

Pavilion, produced when Dorit Margreiter Choy represented Austria at the 2009 Venice Biennale, portrays the building as host to a fragmented series of historical events and memories of past and forgotten moments. An empty shell in itself, it is activated by the ideology and politics of the country it is meant to represent.

In their juxtaposition and coexistence, all the works in the exhibition address the relationship between material erasure, preservation, and the activation of histories. The mobile that connects them defines itself as a moving space. The letters it is composed of form the word “passage”, which describes an essential characteristic of the exhibition space in Cukrarna Gallery, but also alludes to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades project: as an analysis of the present along vanishing points of history.