The outer surface of the sponge is the skeleton into which the animal withdraws.

Dynasty Butterfly is a two-channel video installation, I made in collaboration with Florian Aschka for the group show "Göttliche Liebschaften" at VBKÖ - Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen Österreich -Austrian Association of Women Artists (Vienna) in 2014. For the exhhibition opening, we created a live performance with Hotel Butterfly featuring Wilhelm Bunder, Lucious, Muniel Muniel and Florian and myself. Dynasty Butterfly has also been shown at „sampling surface“ group show at moe contemporary Vienna, later in 2014. Find video stills, documentation of the performance photographed by Julia Gaisbacher, and a text below.

 

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To watch both videos (ideally, next to each other - if possible)
click here http://vimeo.com/butterflydynasty/butterflydynasty1
and http://vimeo.com/butterflydynasty/butterflydynasty2
password: Alexis

Documentaion of the performance at VBKÖ photographed by Julia Gaisbacher
 

001 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

002 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

003 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

004 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

005 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

006 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

007 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher

008 dynasty butterfly gkp Julia Gaisbacher


Transformation 

The artists reveal in/sights and present out/takes from their modular hybrid work Dynasty Butterfly, con- ceived as an instrument situated between live moment, performance, moving image and installation. It deals with processes of transformation and translation between nature and culture.

According to the context at hand, Dynasty Butterfly rearranges itself and, via phenomena of outward ap- pearance and luster, trains its focus on the visual dialog between universal myths of divine creation and observations of nature’s merciless day-to-day life. And in the process, oriental and arabesque images from popular culture, such as those produced in Bollywood since around 1950, meet with documentary material bearing witness to “wild(-)life.”

By way of the concept of divinity, these video projections are transformed into productions of queer images. In doing so, they probe both exoticizing phenomena and expectations that lead to the formati- on of pictorial languages in a public environment of consumption. The projections thus create their own myth while also representing an attempt to stimulate the potential to describe new and as-yet-uncertain realms of action, images and thought.

Apparent facts (Viennese locations such as Belvedere palace complex, the lakeside urban development project in Aspern, and the Butterfly House at the Burggarten) and sparkling fictions (the life cycle of a butterfly-divinity) encounter and touch one another, with the overlapping and interweaving of these two projections giving rise to a multitude of possible interpretations that, via a random loop, continually reor- der themselves and engage in unexpected communication with one another.

The attendant flickering of the moving images functions as a cinematic light source that attempts to attract the observer’ gaze much like it would a moth, inviting it along on boisterous flights of courtship between the two worlds of images (“wanderers between habitats”).

This process of constant (trans)formation thus reflects a practice of resistance with regard to patriarchal and linear historiography, critically questioning established norms and narratives that have developed historically and institutionally via linguistic systems of persuasion and conviction.

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