“Wir bauen Zukunft” I Gillian Brett I Artist in Residence 2016

Gillian Brett extracts machines from the machines’ universe. Her sculptures are offbeat, absurd and poetic representations of technological and mechanical devices out of their context. This extraction gives them an uncanny look that somehow echoes the feeling she had while strolling by night in a deserted Wiener Prater. In the project “Wir bauen Zukunft” she mixed tools with toys, funfair machines with construction ones, in order to blur the borders between the categories of entertainment and seriousness. What are we playing at? Where does the game stop? Karl Kraus wrote that “Art serves to rinse out our eyes”; by giving us to see these machines devoid of function Gillian Brett invited us to question the overwhelming place they have taken in this world.