Artwork by: Klaus Pichler
1 Gram of Life
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former grain storage and former farm.
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The weight of 1 grain is approximately 1 gram. 1 grain gives a hope for life. Through this art exhibition we are discovering the question of the value of human life. Ukraine used to deliver grain to over 400mln people worldwide. Ukraine used to be a country that in normal times fed 10 times its own population, possessing some of the richest agricultural land in the world.
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However, the situation has changed dramatically with the Russian invasion into Ukraine. Hunger is used as the tool of war and oppression. Human life is devalued. Ukraine’s front-line farmers battle to feed the world. In field, sown with bombs, Ukrainian farmers collect deadly harvest. How much does it cost now for Ukraine to grow grain, vegetables and fruits?
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We don´t want our children to experience war or hunger. That is why it is important to draw attention to these burning issues in an attempt to create a better future for the upcoming generations.
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The exhibition deals with the topic of grain and food security for the sustainable future in relation with the history of Ankerbrotfabrik. “In 1891, Heinrich and Fritz Mendel founded the Viennese bread and pastry factory in Vienna's Favoriten district. In 1938, the factory was aryanized, and the Mendl family managed to flee into exile. The factory was severely damaged in the war, but it was still possible to maintain production almost continuously. In April 1945, after the end of the war, an emergency program was launched to resume the supply of the Viennese population. The founding family returned and Ankerbrot became the property of the Mendl family again.” (Source) The art exhibition organized at the Ankerbrotfabrik will reflect upon the topic of grain and the value of human life in relation to the history of the factory through the prism of the contemporary situation in Ukraine.
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Artists: Klaus Pichler, Marta Syrko, Maria Proshkowska, Christima Helena Romirer, Pavlo Mazai, Helene Litorelle, Oksana Gryniv, Yana Gryniv.
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Curated by: Yana Gryniv
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Public relations: Nadiia Yanieva
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This exhibition is part of the FAVORITE FALL festival 2024.
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Time: 21-28.09.2024 (*check the schedule!!!)​
20.09
22:00-06:00
21.09
13:00-15:00
An artistic audio walk through the Brotfabrik and its history (GE)
Brotfabrik, Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Entrance: Tickets
25.09
10:00-22:00
Exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
(online guided tour (EN)
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former grain storage.
Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
28.09
12:00-13:00
Guided tour (EN) through the exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former farm.
Zukunftshof
(Rosiwalgasse 41-43, 1100 Vienna)
By invitation only
28.09
17:00-22:00
21.09
15:00-16:00
Opening of the exhibition “1 Gram of Life” and guided tour (EN)
Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
22.09
14:00-16:00
Exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
(online guided tour (EN)
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former grain storage.
Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
26.09
10:00-22:00
Exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
(online guided tour (EN)
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former grain storage.
Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
28.09
14:00-15:00
Guided tour (GE,EN) through the exhibition
“1 Gram of Life”
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former farm.
(Rosiwalgasse 41-43, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
21.09
15:00-18:00
19:00-22:00
Exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
(online guided tour (EN)
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former grain storage.
Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
24.09
10:00-22:00
Exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
(online guided tour (EN)
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former grain storage.
Das LOT (Absberggasse 31, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
28.09
10:00-16:00
Exhibition “1 Gram of Life”
(online guided tour (EN)
Austrian-Ukrainian art exhibition on the topic of grain in the former farm.
Zukunftshof
(Rosiwalgasse 41-43, 1100 Vienna)
Free entrance
28.09
11:00-16:00
“Grain As A Weapon”
photography series
Klaus Pichler, born in 1977, is a photographer from Vienna, Austria. An original landscape architect, he focuses on themes at the intersection of ecology, society, science and discourse, driven by curiosity about how people and their environments interact. His projects have been exhibited internationally and he has published several of them as photo books, such as “Golden Days Before the End” (Edition Patrick Frey, 2016), “This will change your life forever” (self-published, 2017), “The Petunia Carnage (self-published, 2021) or “Fear guards the lemon grove” (Fw:books, 2024).
“Sculpture”
photography series
Ukrainian-born fine-art photographer Marta Syrko (1995) is illuminating to the world the high cost of war, which she stunningly displays through her current portrait series, Sculpture. Confronting her own intergenerational traumas, and the traumas currently inflicted on her country by russia’s full-scale invasion, Marta seeks to bring awareness and healing to the complex nature and lasting impacts of war: on the infrastructures of mind, body and soul; and enduring societal challenges. These obstacles in Marta’s and her country’s path, serve as a creative exploration into pondering on how our greatest obstacles can lead to greater personal and collective healing.
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Marta currently lives in a war-zone. She understands deeply the nuanced damaging impacts of war from her own current lived experience. She has endured living in an apartment with her husband with shattered windows, due to the shock-waves of missiles colliding with nearby buildings. Following that experience, she lived in a building with twenty other people in order to have access to a basement-come-bomb shelter. At one point, Marta generously opened up her studio for those experiencing homelessness due to the war. She has endured the terrors of war, its tremendously painful impacts on her nervous system, and knows very personally what it means to not feel safe.
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In her series, Sculptures, Marta portrays severely wounded people recovering from their war-related traumas. Working with them in her studio in Lviv, where she grew up and currently resides, she took time to get acquainted with each of them, hear their stories, and the traumas they endured. It was their first time being photographed nude, aside from a delicately placed cloth. Marta created a safe environment for them in which to be vulnerable, engaging each of them with a profound sense of empathy, dignity, and tenderness.
“Farina”
video performance
In this performance Maria Proshkowska had been grinding into flower Ukrainian grain, destroyed by the russian shelling. She didn´t stop for a second for 5 hours.
To show Maria´s performance at Das LOT means a lot to us! This space used to be a grain storage at the bread factory, once aryanized by the Nazi. We see a strong connection to the space and a close parallel with the contemporary situation of the russian invasion into Ukraine.
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A solo 5 hours duration performance by Maria Proshkovska, which took place on 17 September 2023 in Bologna, in one of the largest and most powerful museums of contemporary art in Italy, MAMbo – Museo D’Arte Moderna di Bologna/ex Forno Del Pane.
Curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Giulia Pezzoli.
“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced millions of Ukrainian women and children to ask for protection in different parts of the world. In the same way Maria and her son Illya came to Bologna, where the city’s commune and MAMbo provided them with shelter. When such terrible things as war happen, the very most basic things are the most valuable. Things that have been the foundation of human society for thousands of years: safety, roof, and food – daily bread.
A focal point of city life, MAMbo has become a source of inspiration, work, and new relationships for the artist. The institution today fulfils the same role that another one on the same site did in the past. One of the largest public ovens in southern Europe – Forno Del Pane not only acted as a guarantor of hunger prevention in the region, creating opportunities for all people in need to feed their families, but also served as a platform for social communications and developing the society.
Bologna has always been open to progress, very hospitable and has developed social initiatives. Curiosity and openness to others is a distinctive feature of Bolognese people, and this is the reason why the Ukrainian artist and her son became part of the cultural life and people’s lives. This special ability to be heard in the city prompted Maria to create a performance that is not only an act of gratitude to Bologna, but is also closely connected to her suffering homeland. In this way, the artist wants to continue to speak about the need to support Ukraine and remind us that the war continues to destroy all, even the most fundamental spheres of people’s life as well as global world food safety.
Referring to the endless cycle of the millstone, Maria metaphorically traces the commonality of human experience and, in this utilitarian way, highlights the unified basic values that are understandable and important to everyone. Giving up her physical effort and time, the artist makes flour for 5 hours from Ukrainian grain burned due to the direct missile hit of russian aggression in front of the city’s residents and visitors. Just like years ago, the same place between two chimneys* attracts people to join the process of bread making and growth of hope. The hard physical labour of a graceful young woman and the grain burning from a direct missile hit reminds us of the high price Ukraine is paying for the harvests of recent years, where a wheat field has become a real battlefield.
We can only state the fact that today cultural institutions are a kind of guarantor of our humanity and honesty with ourselves, our points of attraction. Just as the public oven was the core of what it means to be a city, our temples of cultural treasures are the core of what it means to be a human being.”
*One of the largest public ovens in Italy – Forno del Pane built in 1915 by the mayor Francesco Zanardi and now home to MAMbo.
"Attacked Lifelines"
installation
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In mid-September 2023, Klaus Pichler received a package from Ukraine, sent by a Ukrainian dock worker who had followed his call. The contents: burnt grain - wheat and barley - that was destroyed in a Russian drone attack on the Ukrainian Danube port of Izmail in the summer of 2023. The attack on this grain warehouse is just one of a long list of targeted Russian attacks on Ukrainian agricultural, grain and port infrastructure that have occurred since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.
Ukraine, also called the “breadbasket of Europe”, was the fourth largest exporter of agricultural products in the world in 2021 with an export volume of 33.5 million tons, and it is estimated that around 400 million people - mainly from countries in the Middle East and Africa - were dependent on Ukrainian grain. The deliberate blockade of Ukrainian sea routes by the Russian invaders brought exports across the Black Sea to a virtual standstill for months and global grain prices skyrocketed. Together with the systematic destruction of Ukrainian grain infrastructure and the organized theft of grain from the occupied territories, there was a 'weaponization of food' by Russia.
Klaus Pichler's work “Attacked Lifelines” attempts to explain the global impact of the Russian attacks on the Ukrainian grain industry. In addition to the grain itself – images of destroyed grain from the port in Izmail - the focus is on quantifying the attacks on the grain sector through amounts, curves, figures and statistics in order to illustrate the dimensions of the Russian invasion and its impact on global food security.
The burned grains are therefore not just a relic of war and a tiny fraction of an almost incomprehensible amount of grain that was deliberately destroyed. The charred grains also contain a report on how global commodity cycles work, on food exports, globalized trade, international inequalities and dependencies, and, above all: they are a symbol of the vulnerability of the world's food supply.
Oksana Gryniv, Yana Gryniv​
“Daily Bread”
Embroidered towel by Oksana Gryniv
Installation by Yana Gryniv
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The traditional Ukrainian embroidered towel contains symbols of land and grain and is hand made. Usually, the most important events in the lives of Ukrainians are accompanied by presence of such a towel. Also, there is an ancient Ukrainian tradition to put bread on this towel to mark how valuable and important it is.
The handmade embroidered towel embodies the Ukrainian tradition which has existed for many centuries. The thread for the cloth and the cloth for the towel from the installation were handmade by Oksana´s mother and embroidered by Oksana. It takes about 2 months of everyday work to produce such a towel. The smaller the stitches are, the more valuable the piece is. This is a special cross stitch embroidery, where every element is symbolic. In the Ukrainian tradition, red means love, black means grief. The towel is telling the story of traditions, love for the native land, respect for the land, crop and grain.
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​Ukrainian grain burned by the Russian shelling. Delivered from Izmail in the Odesa region, Ukraine.
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Parts of the drone were provided by Odesa Regional Administration
“Unit of Value”
Installation made of corn in the form of gold bars
Christina Helena Romirer, geboren in Graz, lebt und arbeitet in Wien und Graz. 2017 Diplom Transmediale Kunst an der Universit für Angewandte Kunst. 2009 Diplom Bühnengestaltung an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz. In ihren Arbeiten beschäftigt sie sich mit Gegenständen, Materialien und Elementen, die das zeitgenössische Leben charakterisieren und unserem alltäglichen Handeln zugeschrieben werden. Indem sie diese dekontextualisiert, transformiert und ihren ursprünglichen Nutzen hinterfragt, verweist sie auf gesellschaftspolitische Phänomene und kritisiert diese. Eine weitere Komponente sind Texte, die sich auf unsere gegenwärtigen Anliegen beziehen, einschließlich des manipulativen Einflusses der Medien und des konsumorientiertes Verhaltens der Gesellschaft. Durch Sprach- und Wahrnehmungsspiel untersucht Christina Romirer, wie Gesellschaftsstrukturen Grenzen setzen und so unsere Bewegungsfreiheit einschränken.