Josef Dabernig
∗1956, Austria
lives and works in Vienna, Austria
On the occasion of the Biennale Gherdëina, the Austrian artist Josef Dabernig (*1956, Austria), in collaboration with curator Adam Budak, conceived a project entitled Cinema of Worldmaking, in the course of which he converted the old dining room of the Hotel Ladinia, a building at the historical heart of St. Ulrich/Ortisei that has been standing empty for years. For the entire duration of the biennial, the Cinema of Worldmaking every day presented a selection of short and feature-length films by artists. On the Worldmaking Cinema Fridays, moreover, some films were shown that have written cinematic history, such as Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows) by Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1965 or Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Ugly, Dirty and Bad) by Ettore Scola from 1976. Among the artist videos there are also some short film by Dabernig himself. In fact, the artist began his career, in the early eighties, as a sculptor, turned filmmaker in 1996 and soon gained international recognition. His films often are set in rough sceneries, take an existentialist approach, and come in a minimal and dry, ordered and well-structured style. The modernist language of international post-war architecture plays a major role for Dabernig’s work as an artist. His formal structure, as a codification of the social and political history at times is changed through hybrid texts and a romantic plot. Another video by Dabernig was presented at the waiting room of a dental practice in St. Ulrich. Heavy Metal Detox is an aesthetic circumlocution, as it were, starting out from a procedure the artist has done on his own body in order to have his dental fillings removed. Taking on a spiritual and existential, sarcastic and nihilist perspective, the operation intensifies into a cantata coming in a cinematic format.
And finally, Dabernig is also represented in the biennial with sculptural works from the beginnings of his artistic career that were created during his studies at the Universty of Applied Arts in Vienna under the guidance of his teacher Joannis Avramidis. The latter didn’t allow Dabernig to conclude his studies with some drawings and theoretical concepts, but instead demanded the production of an actual sculpture. The figurative form language of these early works, which Dabernig largely distanced himself from after his studies, down to this day provide an insight into the development of his minimalist style, that also has had a strong influence on his sculptural oeuvre of recent years. This fallback on his first sculptural works can be understood as a conceptual answer and reference to the sculptural tradition of the Val Gardena itself.
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