WORLD CITY

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Starting from a random location outside a city and walking towards the centre, the camera, which is the companion of Wolfgang Lehrner in his explorations, is capturing moments of a journey to what he calls the world city. The artist undertakes his journeys following his gut feeling. The result to be seen by the viewer is not the artist's journey, but an accumulation of moving images recording seemingly accidental observations whilst the camera is not in motion. It is not the creator of the image who is in motion but what is filmed — provided there is an action to be documented. The immobile camera stands in opposition to the explorative moving of the artist and the reverberations of a city.
Barcelona, Chicago, Doha, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, Naples, New York, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Tokyo, ...

But it is not that important to name the places Wolfgang Lehrner is visiting. It is rather an attempt to understand a city as a space independently from its national boundaries and to look at it from a global perspective without denying local properties. Space, as Lefebvre elaborates on extensively in his influential oeuvre The Production of Space, is in a constant becoming, and defined by multiplicity and interrelations between the mental, physical and social fields. The contemporaneous intensities of the global and the local, and the intersections of overlappings, make the differentiation impossible, and thus enable an unfolding of the ongoing investigation World City: 21st Century Cosmopolitan Investigations.