WORLD/CITY
Mladen Banjac, 2019

The main protagonist of China Miéville’s novel The City and the City lives on the boundary between two worlds, in a city that actually exists as two cities, as two parallel universes, albeit in the same space, invisible to one another, and yet the exact opposites in every way imaginable, separated by an imaginary and fantastic line. The hero of the novel trenscends this barrier and conjures up a wholesome image of the city. This novel immediately springs to mind on seeing the work of the Viennese artist Wolfgang Lehrner, presented in the exhibition WORLD/CITY at the Museum of Contemporary Art of RS.

A common denominator of Lehrner’s series of photographs and videos, the latter frequently also still images or moving photographs, is the fact the artist, like the viewer, is in the same position as the hero of The City and the City, except that in this case it is the artist who discovers otherwise invisible parts of world metropolises and exhibits his discoveries for the viewer to see. The theme of Lehrner’s explorations is tales yet untold or unknown about the cities he has visited, about the worlds that once were or still exist today, but are not experienced true to what they really are.

The series A Nameless City (Ciudad sin Nombre), taken in the vicinity of Mexico City, shows a rocky landscape sprawling infinitely, which in truth is the place where the ancient Aztec capital lay once, now gone without a trace.

VIE CEE is a series of photographs showing carefully selected scenes with personal undertones, which explore the identities of lookalike cities, previously part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while simultaneously offering a utopian vision of Vienna.

Lehrner’s newest series Medineo is a record of a new civilisational context of the Mediterranean as the navel of the world, with cities no longer the actual habitations along the coast connected by common economic interests and trade, but rather cities on water, gigantic cruise ships, man-made products created as monuments to the human race, which reference the centres of power of the ancient world.

The Standard City is a series of photographs showing movement, which is strangely actual as well as somewhat hermetic, through London, along Axis Mundi, or the prime meridian. The photos document changes to specific ideas and concepts as archetypal about man’s relation to the city and the world.

Lehrner’s works may as well be seen as records of the art of performance, since the artist frequently finds himself in situations that require physical exertion, if his work is to adequatly present what he seeks to show. On the other hand, although the series vary in content, they all have a dose of tense serenity to them captured at the moment the snapshot was taken.

The artist does not only focus on objects found in urban environments, but also on people, who make an essential part of a particular city. Thus, we see people in their private premises or public open spaces, creators of the tale of a place (locus), as if suspended in space or frozen in time. The relation between people and the places they are in is rather engrossing; if it’s a city they’re surrounded by, they are motionless, while the city is in motion; or else, they are embedded in a space of their own, constituting a cell of a big organism.

The central idea of this exhibition is that it’s people who make up a city, and cities make up the world. The exhibition is unique for the way in which Wolfgang Lehrner investigates and presents societal, historical, social, individual and collective factors. They all both exist and do not exist; they live in some people’s stories and memories, but are completely unknown to others, while jointly constituting this world, which is both true to and different from how we experience it. Just as these photography series are composite mosaics of carefully selected frames showing particular cities, all those cities taken collectively make a single world map.