Isabella Oberländer

b. 1986, Austria

With CG 08 I am very much concerned about the structure between complexity and simplicity, and what is essentially needed to communicate the themes, the core statements, in the notion of expression. How much can be reduced so that the artwork is still communicating with the audience, but reaches a state of purity about what was desired to express? Behind that question also is the idea that ‘emptiness is fullness’ by Alexis Clancy, which comes out of the Zen culture. So, also dealing with that statement, all is already included in the simplest thing. To work with the efficiency of expression so that, for example, looking at dance works, every move is already included in the simplicity of walking and that the human, the human body, just forgot it through all the daily influences and pollution from our society/environment.

Also, through the influences of past collaborations with artists from non-dance-related genres, and especially cross-media and genre projects, I became really fascinated by this ” ‘unknown’ field between co-existence and fusion from different artistic ways of expression, which seems to open up. This relating and working together can create nearly ‘magical’ spaces of potential for artworks.

Working with all those possibilities, I am constantly aiming for purity, so that the actual presented work doesn’t loose its flexibility to transform and open up the vision of the viewer for ‘another look’ at it, a different pathway of the individual’s visual perception.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)