Wandertag 3

ARTIST: Lukas Thaler

26 Aug – 29 Aug 2021

Wandertag, Neu Leopoldau, 21. Bezirk

For Wandertag, Lukas Thaler developed a new series of objects that infiltrate their surroundings, spread out like a net and enter into a subtle symbiosis with their exhibition site. Whether tea cups and milk jugs, lamp-like tubular structures or sculptural seating: Thaler’s objects explore functional, aesthetic, and formal potentials of various everyday objects and their materials. With an interest in processes of transformation as well as the communicative abilities of various materials, Thaler’s staging plays with the social, personal, and poetic associations that the objects trigger. 

The setting for Thaler’s exploration is a former electrical building, which will soon function as a public community space in the Neu Leopoldau residential complex. The transformer building is located in the centre of a place in transition. Situated between listed buildings of the former Leopoldau gasworks, new residential structures, and large-scale construction sites, Neu Leopoldau currently bundles together diverse moods and spatial contexts. As a converted industrial site, stories of producing  around 250,000 cubic meters of gas per hour around 1911 and bombings during World War II overlap with future visions of communal coexistence. 

Wandertag project invites visitors to break out of their patterns of movement, change
their usual pace of being in the city, and experience art and neighborhoods in a new way.
Each Wandertag leads to a location selected by the curator Nora Mayr and the artists
Julischka Stengele, Lukas Thaler, Marianne Vlaschits and Anna Witt. Whether an industrial
area, the shop window of a car dealer, a house facade or a public observatory – each
location offers a new approach to the artistic practice of the invited artists as well as
unusual views of Vienna.

CURATOR: Nora Mayr