For the crows to pluck | Mathias Pöschl

Welcome address | Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein
(Art historian, curator, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

Mathias Pöschl in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen
(Cultural scientist and journalist, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

Mainly working with drawing and sculpture, Pöschl's practice brings together a formalist approach with ideas that relate to cultural borrowing and social injustice. His works explore the paradoxes of politically active groups like the Black Panther Party that invoked militancy to fight for equal rights while being caught up in homophobic tendencies. Such collisions articulate also in the minimalist visual language of his works, where images are deliberately left unfinished or coloured using materials such as shoe polish to increase the effect of their thick and opaque black tones. The works and the title of the exhibition take inspiration from Billie Holiday's song "Strange Fruit" (1939) in which poplar trees were used for gallows to hang Afro-Americans, whereby now they are used to fabricate commercial pallets. Pöschl has reassembled one of them into a gallows, presented on top of the collapsed structure of the Demoraum transformed into a podium. (DB)