con-tempus art award 2021

As part of the exhibition: A Playground Guide to Getting Lost. Promotion Prize of the Province of Styria for Contemporary Fine Arts 2021. Neue Galerie Graz. Curator: Lina Albrikiene

Employing shifting formats and an ironic, critical manner, Veronika Hauer is concerned with conveying speech and with linking language and the body. Her series The Animated Alphabet references and re-stages historical, pedagogical pictorial material, combining these into a poetic composition on single letters of the alphabet. Each print in the series stands for another letter and meshes alliterations/rhymes with graphic elements, in which the letter can be found once again in the contours of bodies or objects. Each print can be read as a subliminal instruction to viewers and thus follows the interplay between script and performative event that underlies Hauer’s work. In Hauer’s objects, a letter and part of a body merge: the first letter of the body part depicted emerges from the cast of a hand, a foot, an ear (e.g. L for leg, E for ear). Or a child’s fist clenched into the symbolic hand gesture of the fig sign grows from the trunk of a letter.

Installation views: A Playground Guide to Getting Lost. Neue Galerie Graz, 2021
Fotos: N. Lackner