installations

I can't see the wood for the trees anymore

Installation: metal, plaster, wood, lithography, acrylic, 16 mm frame, found objects
2021

The body has grown with roots and scars,
first open and abstract through grasping,
then direct and complex through pointing,
conclusions mark the flat surface.

Processes touch no depth,
trickle away in a stable tunnel with greedy gazes,
a manipulative imprint brands the whole mass,
without origin in thought,
without hold.

Profits without shame are propped up on
the actual true status symbol,
overburdened with material property,
the possession of one's naturalness branches off.

Installation view: Expositur Paulusplatz 5, University of Applied Arts, Vienna

Photos by Raphael Reichl

P.A.H. (Sweden Aid)

City-Light-Poster, digital color print, 118.5 × 175 cm
2019

A humorous to ironic connection evolves in the collages of Raphael Reichl, who combines the context of origin of the Per-Albin-Hansson housing estate with the history of the Austrian sweet Schwedenbomben (Swedish bombs). By interweaving two such specific and seemingly alien elements, which he projects onto the housing estate, he breaks up historical narratives. The fragmented filmic material questions reality, documentation and transmission.

(written by Clara Hofmann)

Exhibition view: IM VORBEI, Per-Albin-Hansson-Siedlung Ost: Bergtaidingweg, Vienna
during the project of Per Albin initiated by Doris Krüger and Ilse Lafer with KÖR Vienna, curated by Clara Hofmann

Photos by Mira Klug

The Erased Brain

Installation: Styrofoam, putty, wire, steel, MDF, electronic mechanics
2019

Technical support

Arno Gitschthaler and Felix Huber

The Erased Brain is an installation of kinetic sculptures that basically represent mechanisms in geometric form. Starting from the question of what truth means, autonomous bodies move in space. Time is a sensation of its own, like an autonomous being. Raphael Reichl tries to depict the natural law of being by using geometric bodies. To what extent can humans accurately describe the present? On the other side, of observation, there is the additional question of how precisely we can observe?

The rotating cones show a simultaneity and parallelism in an endless movement. The cuboid sculpture performs a movement of lifting and dropping and represents the phenomenon of gravity as well as a transmission of an impulse or a moment. These mechanisms can also be understood as a metaphor of film production—like shooting and cutting. Thus, the manipulation of space and time begins with human intervention.

Installation view: Expository Paulusplatz 5, University of Applied Arts, Vienna
with works by Ana Likar (on the wall)

Photos by Raphael Reichl

revolvere

Installation: 16 mm projector, 16 mm film, b/w, silent, 9 sec (Loop)
iPhone 7, video, colour, silent, 5 min (Loop)
2018

In April 2018, the social situation in Nicaragua escalated due to countless shared accusations on social media channels of public crimes and murders. Protest movements were organised against Daniel Ortega's authoritarian system of government. It was not only a political conflict between the government and the demonstrators on the streets, it became also a political debate due social media around the globe, when turbulent emotions were posted at a high speed in the virtual space. How much truth remains between cries for help and agitation? And, coming from the so-called global north, how can I deal with all this information?

In the installation revolvere, Raphael Reichl questions the concept of revolution and symbolises the etymology in a comparison of image-reproducing apparatuses of their technical evolution. If in the 15th century revolution used to mean literally circling and later, only from the time of the French Revolution, violent political coup, then the connotation of the word has changed significantly from a circular to a more linear process. What political challenges does Western society face in crises when our understanding of revolution is always associated with radical changes and steady linear growth?

The machines move parallelly in their presence—in time with the revolution—progress or repetition of interchangeable rulers?

Installation view: Shifting Sites: Activate the Territories, Expository Paulusplatz 5, University of Applied Arts, Vienna

Photos by Raphael Reichl

Red Green Birth

Film installation: aluminium, 16 mm projector
Film: 16 mm, colour, silent, 1 min (loop)
2018

Exhibition view: Kulturverein Shizzle, Hernalser Hauptstraße 37, 1170 Vienna

notprojektion

Installation: aluminium, 16 mm projector
2018

Raphael Reichl adapted his 16 mm film installation Rot Grün Geburt (Red Green Birth) for the exhibition pubic viewing, which took place during the public screening of the 2018 Football World Cup held next to it. The artist thus re-functions the dispositive, the projector and the screen as the popular and the regime of images. But the work recognises the difference between digital culture, vis-à-vis the huge LCD screen mounted outside, which glows from itself, and the principle of analogue projection, which casts its images onto a support via light. In the arrangement of the notgalerie, however, this light is no longer cast by the machine, but by the sun, which takes on a colour pattern from outside through the installation Notrichter and is distributed throughout the space.

(Written by Reinhold Zisser)

Group exhibition: pubic viewing at the notgalerie, Aspern North, Vienna