Antonia Rippel-Stefanska

Einer glänzt weniger [One shines less]

A cooperation between the MAK and the University of Applied Arts Vienna

8.12.2020—10.1.2021

Creative Climate Care Gallery

In the fifth and final pop-up exhibition of the series CREATIVE CLIMATE CARE in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna, artist Antonia Rippel-Stefanska focuses her thoughts regarding the pandemic and climate crisis on social relationships and crucial human emotions and experiences, such as separation anxiety, dependence, and helplessness. Her analogy is a game in which individual draws have lasting impact on the collective.

Which new rules are established to reach a common goal? Which actuality of life is my starting point, which path do I choose, and does my position change with time and newly gained information? Can we work on something big, oversee its complexity, if we as individuals have not yet recognized the consequences of our behavioral patterns? What happens when we postulate limitation as a necessity for further development?

These and further considerations form the setting for Rippel-Stefanska’s spacious multimedia installation Einer glänzt weniger [One shines less], a kind of game or family constellation. Videos function as “playing fields,” sculptures as “pawns”: In this constellation, Rippel-Stefanska translates the challenges we currently face and the social change these challenges imply onto the structures and dynamics of a family. She asks how the family as a unit, from which societies and personalities emerge, reacts towards these newly generated fields and scopes of action.

Curator: Marlies Wirth

Antonia Rippel-Stefanska completed her graduate degree in “Fine Arts: Sculpture and Space,” headed by Prof. Hans Schabus, in 2018. In her artistic practice, the artist, who also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, addresses broad sculptural questions, volume and space, appropriation and autonomy.

CREATIVE CLIMATE CARE

A cooperation between the MAK and the University of Applied Arts Vienna