Gezählte Stunden

The exhibition Counted Hours presents a dialogue between works by the legendary German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven and the Austrian photo and video artist Julia Gaisbacher, whose artistic approaches are closely and personally intertwined.

For her latest long-term project, Julia Gaisbacher spent several weeks in Darboven’s former studio, a space that has remained unchanged since the artist’s death in 2009. Her sensitive black-and-white photographs taken there are juxtaposed with large-format works by Darboven, in which Darboven herself explored the medium of photography.

Hanne Darboven (born in Munich in 1941, died in Hamburg in 2009) was one of the most significant representatives of conceptual art. She devoted much of her work to the visualization of time. Beginning in the 1960s, she developed a system of numbers and codes through which she reordered and “described” hours, days, weeks, months, years, and entire epochs.

Julia Gaisbacher (born in 1983 in Graz) bases her practice on extensive research and long-term observation. Her aim is to photographically trace and reveal the relationships between architecture and society. Her works resist linear or classical narrative structures; instead, they strive to make the stories behind the stories perceptible.

In Gezählte Stunden (Counted Hours), Gaisbacher sets out in search of what she calls the “present absentees”—and encounters the complex presence that defines Darboven’s world.