Weekly conversations ...with Inga Thiele
Inga Thiele, together with her colleague Jackie Grassmann, moved into one of our studios at Hegelgasse 14, 1010 Vienna. Here is a small interview to give you an understanding of her artistic practice and her views.
How would you describe your current way of working?
Since one year now I am enrolled as a student in the Master of Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Amongst other things, I studied Art History before as my BA and realized how, for it to extend its ability to speak to our world beyond stylistic and formal interpretations, it would need to redefine its parameters. I am currently researching on more open, less disciplinary approaches to art criticism/writing and curating, while at the same time focussing on my own writing practice that tries to combine poetic, sometimes autobiographic and rather narrative ways of story-telling with art theory/history and criticism. I also work as a freelance curator and try to look at my work with the consciousness that takes exhibition-making as well as writing as social gestures.
Is having studio space a new experience for you? If yes, what are the benefits that you are looking forward to?
Yes, it is a new experience! So far, I’ve mostly worked from home, libraries, trains or friend’s studios. There are a few things I’d like to start doing now, that are connected to ideas of exhibitions I’d like to realize in the space but also performances, film nights or dinner parties. It’s great to have a space that you can use for whatever purpose and it opens up new ways of how you see yourself as well. It’s a bit scary. Like now you really start taking yourself and your work more seriously or something.
Is there something that artistically or thematically grabs your attention right now in the art world?
I am currently researching on the interrelations, co-existences, dependencies and appropriations in the contemporary art world and market as well as in cultural politics. The dynamics between the so called off-scene and the commercial scene, how they’re overlapping and nursing each other. Vienna is a special place in terms of its density of artist-run exhibition spaces, institutions and galleries as well as the Vienna Contemporary and Parallel fair. The structures given by the city’s policy for funding etc. but also the parasitic interrelations are something that I am studying right now.