Rehousing is the title of a series of works by Peter Friedl which comprises a selection of individual, intricate, and true-to-scale models of houses. Collectively, these structures materialize as constructed environments that reflect the recent past, different biographies, and ideologies in diverse ways; they are “case studies for the mental geography of an alternative modernity.”
Rehousing is also the title of this publication, which revisits and reconceives the series through the juxtaposition of images of the individual models with a diverse collection of short stories and poems. Imagined as an anthology, as well as an artist book, it constitutes a reframing of the houses by the contributing authors who expand on the separate history of the buildings, draw on them to realize alternative fictions, or depart entirely from the origins of the related house altogether. Rehousing furthermore signals a change of location: a literal and metaphorical move to another type of accommodation, space, place, shelter, or home.
Ever since Peter Friedl (born 1960 in Oberneukirchen, Austria, lives and works in Berlin and New York) first entered the international contemporary art scene in the early 1990s, his artistic practice has continually challenged the art world. As “conceptual acts,” his works take on the role of models: as exemplary articulations and solutions of aesthetic problems involving political and historical consciousness. With them, Friedl continues to transgress the borders of art, a process begun by the Conceptual Art of the 1960s, opening contemporary art to its social, economic, and institutional conditions. “Overcoming the dictate of visibility, without using text as a substitute,” is how Friedl outlines his artistic program.
Friedl has participated in Documenta X and XII (1997, 2007); the 48th Venice Biennale (1999); the 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2004); the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006); Manifesta 7, Trento (2008); the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); the 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008), and the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial (2009).
His solo exhibitions include “Blow Job” at Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen (2008); “Working” at Kunsthalle Basel (2008); the retrospective survey “Work 1964–2006” at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miami Art Central, and Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille (2006–07); and “Out of the Shadows” at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004).
Edited by Kunsthalle Wien.
Texts by Hanif Abdurraqib, Ibrahim al-Koni, Hala Alyan, Attila Bartis, Dionne Brand, Amina Cain, Ann Cotten, Achmat Dangor, Mark Z. Danielewski, Renee Gladman, Nalo Hopkinson, Annemarie Jacir, Davide Longo, Sabrina Orah Mark, Mohale Mashigo, Céline Minard, Karen Pinkus, Mark von Schlegell, Madeleine Thien, Mike Wilson; foreword by Vanessa Joan Müller.
