Steel
Plaster
Gotische Halle Graz
For her exhibition in the Gothic Hall, Mara Novak draws attention to its rooms by painstakingly rebuilding them in plaster. In her Vienna studio, she consequently uses the resulting models to carry out experiments with direct exposures.
Mara Novak’s artworks are real: they share their reality with us in the exhibition space, with other materials in the space; they are in relation to the room and to the audience - the way they used to be to the artist. Novak shows us that photography is still a material practice and that images have a concrete place in their concrete context – the one of production as well as representation – from which they cannot be arbitrarily removed and that itself cannot be changed on a whim.