Christine König Galerie, Vienna | October 9, 2020 – January 9, 2020
Alona Rodeh’s first solo exhibition at Christine König Galerie, Vienna is an attempt to raise awareness through uncovering narratives of pseudo-secure regulations such as order, gate control, search tactics, traffic monitoring, suspension and exclusivity – be they public or private, concrete or abstract in form. Flickering in the dark, autonomous from any external light source, her works equivalently merge into an installation- and light-based Gesamtkunstwerk while keeping their idiosyncratic status.
Alona Rodeh’s interests in architecture, infrastructure, urbanism, light, design and industrial processes become evident in her careful choice of materials and their accompanying color palette: lightboxes with animal caretakers as protagonists, sound pieces passing coded communication, quasi ready-made objects, security gates and the history of bollard morphology are among other signs and works within a staged parkour.
Often referred to as performances without performers the artist’s installations give attention not only to the inhabiting objects, but to the space in-between. “Full of emptiness”, as the artist puts it, “The Long Stretch” may be read as a forecast – not of the future, but of the present tense. In it, Alona Rodeh functions as a manipulator, guiding our bodies through a space that is narrated through our movement in it. It is a broken, individual, heterogeneous narrative, one that raises questions of how and within what conditions to live and work. Its openness is linked to our – in many ways scattered and free but also restricted and bound – century.