UNEASE | OASIS

Affective Intensities
Kurt Hentschläger

November 3rd, 2023 to January 21st, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, November 3rd, 6 - 9pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, November 5th, 2 - 3pm

The video works presented in Kurt Hentschläger’s Unease | Oasis register the collective anxieties of the current moment, reflecting on the antinomies of contemporary culture and probing civilization’s discontents.

A close-up image of a mushroom is marked by menace and decay as flies crawl over its surface and a distorted synthesizer throbs on the soundtrack. A seemingly solid form proves to be an all too close-up image of undulating flesh. A zombified head struggles to break free from a geometric grid. Bodies spastically convulse or swirl helplessly through a void without horizon or ground. Hentschläger’s work is riddled with anxiety. He saturates his audience in light and sound, viscerally, at times with overwhelming intensity, confronting them with the material immediacy of their affective responses and the difficulty of getting any symbolic distance on them. 

At the same time, and for this same reason, Hentschläger’s work provides something of a refuge from the impossibility of the everyday - an oasis, where one can explore these affective intensities, and the conflicts and contradictions that inform them, unpacking their paradoxical pleasure-in-pain and loosening the grip of their compulsion.

EVENT

Exhibition Documentation

About the Artist

New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates media installations and performances for both physical and virtual venues.

Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive and are known for their perceptual effects. They challenge an audience psychologically but also offer a meditative respite from the day-to-day stress of digitally enhanced life. His representational body of work suggests a semi-synthetic form of nature that serves as a metaphor for our life in the Anthropocene.

Hentschläger’s work practice embraces experiment and interdisciplinary approach, most prominently displayed in his ephemeral audiovisual environments and live shows in between fine arts, music and theater.

Works in the Show