A site that had undergone substantial transformation over the previous five years due to the rebuilding of the Northern Railway Station and whose reconfiguration was just about to enter its final stage, the Praterstern was a time interface along which the perception of urban structures was being redeployed.
The urban display offered by modern Western cities today tends to take the shape of a controlled playscape, a stage for the self-enactment of a globalized iconography and quickly consumable “instant urbanism.” Public space generally is freely accessible today, but not freely usable without restrictions. The connections, shifts, interferences, and cross-references with urban practice in the cityscape around Praterstern marked the starting point of the art projects of URBAN SIGNS – LOCAL STRATEGIES – CONTINUED.

Marita Fraser/Alex Lawler: Heavy Work (stack)
Marita Fraser and Alex Lawler’s intervention entitled Heavy Work (stack) was based on materials such as concrete roadblocks that are used to occupy urban domains. They are found objects in the cityscape, familiar multifunctional pieces of urban furniture, mostly to be seen along road construction sites. Fraser and Lawler were inspired by the sheer presence of the material to make this urban furniture undergo some functional displacement. The relationship of simple form and ton-heavy presence was addressed through artistic intervention and redefined though minimalist painterly encodings.

Johannes Vogl: Untitled (Lichtung)
The sculpture Untitled (Clearing) consisted of an octagonal camouflage net mounted like a canopy on a steel-pole construction about eight meters high on a stretch of lawn. It was a black tarpaulin, eight by eight meters, with stenciled cutouts creating the impression of treetops around a clearing. Stepping onto the area underneath the canopy, one could see a drawing in the sky. It felt like stepping out into a clearing from a dense forest, although the supporting construction with its anchoring cables was still visible on the sides. The octagonal canopy shape referred both to the footprint of nomadic yurts and to the painted coffering of Baroque church cupolas. With this antidotal setting, Johannes Vogl created an oasis amid the urban bustle, although his uses of camouflage techniques might also be read as an allusion to the risk of increasing big-city anonymity.

Nikolaus Gansterer: The Urban Alphabet
Nikolaus Gansterer’s work was about juxtaposing the traffic and transportation hub on Praterstern with a special cartography in the form of an Urban Alphabet, thus visualizing the phenomenon of a highly networked and urbanized world. Gansterer used existing maps of urban agglomerations to draw up a selection of what he called “urban characters” in alphabetical order. Each character was a letter of an imaginary alphabet and a lexeme of a global language. By presenting his results on a wall panel amid the urban environment, this form of learning and knowledge transfer became accessible to passers-by in public space. The site chosen for the presentation was a plaza in front of the new railway station: reminiscent of a school blackboard, the new paneling alongside the rail track with its black surface was ideal for the intervention in respect to size, texture, and visibility.

Sonja Gangl: 1 : 2,35
The artist Sonja Gangl’s approach is based on a thorough media analysis of individual desire-arousing visual contents. Minimizing pictorial information and censorship of parts of the image create a surplus of subjective reality. Shot and countershot, the self and the other are becoming palpable as psychosocial components of a reality-creating pictorialness. Gangl’s 2.81-by-6.60-meter letterboxing work drew on her intensive studies of film theory and the function of Cinemascope bars which mark out aspect ratios and define different formats.

Viktoria Tremmel/Andreas Strauss: TS 001 LUX
The object named TS 001 LUX – a gate, a passageway, but also an automated facility – was placed in the middle of a construction site in front of the railway station on Praterstern to serve passers-by as a kind of “light shower.” Lights shining through to the outside from behind an extra dense string curtain gave the object a mysterious aura intended to lure viewers into walking through to explore what it was. Inside, special daylight lamps had been installed, the kind also used for light therapy against depression. The public sphere was thus transformed into a space of possibility which facilitated fading out for a brief moment the hustle and bustle around the station.*

Christian Mayer: Versetzung der Welt
Since the 1960s, the largest revolvable model of Planet Earth to be found in Vienna has been situated next to the Planetarium in the Prater neighborhood. Christian Mayer’s project Versetzung der Welt (Shifting the Globe) was to move the huge globe, increasingly neglected as a relic of a different era, to the redesigned station plaza on Praterstern for a period of two months to be viewed and set in rotation by thousands and thousands of passers-by. Even if this “shifting of the globe” did not materialize for organizational and conservational reasons, news reports on the project gave cause to wild speculation. On the evening of the project presentation, Christian Mayer stirred up the imagination of the audience in a lecture followed by some remarks from an expert from the Vienna Museum of Globes. A guitar band, Kimberly & Clark, played songs that inspired a yearning for faraway countries.

Texts: Ursula Maria Probst
except *: Christa Benzer