Alex Hanimann  ̶   Same but Different

15. September 2019  ̶  17. November 2019

Opening on Sunday, 15th of September 2019, 11 a.m., Villa Merkel

The exhibition Alex Hanimann – Same but Different by Alex Hanimann brings together a series of new and existing works that focus on the relationship between reality and its depiction. Using the media of photography, video, sculpture, and installations, in his presentation Hanimann examines how we perceive reality in the here and now, and how this perception relates to the subjective perception of time and history.

There are images that are familiar to us from our everyday experience, or images that have been imprinted in the collective memory through the historical and socio-cultural experiences of the late 1960s and 1970s. In terms of form and content, the exhibition can thus be read as an exploration of the question of the fictionalization of the historical or as an examination of the mediality of remembering and archiving.

Since  May 18th, 2014

Lois Weinberger – Mobiler Garten

The ‘Mobile Garden’ of the artist and Documenta participant Lois Weinberger, who lives in Vienna, was set up in front of the winter garden of the Villa Merkel, where it will remain for an extended time. In its wildness, it contrasts with the surrounding Merkelpark, whose well-kept greenery is reminiscent of English landscape gardens.

A field formed out of yellow plastic tubs filled with soil has been exposed to the free forces of nature. Over time, pioneer and ruderal plants have come to occupy the space in a spontaneous colonisation. Nature unfolds in accordance with the dynamism of its own laws in a veritably paradisal, because free manner. A Garden of Eden established itself.

Over the years, this natural process of colonisation began to change into a form of decaThe tubs gradually become bleached and decompose. The plastic particles blend with the soil and the plants; after decades, rainfall can be expected to have washed the underlying area clean again.

The garden is a fundamental form of our encounter with nature. We are familiar with gardens that aim at producing crops as well as those that are set up as beatific sites of contemplation. Affinities with paradise are possessed by the fruit and vegetable garden, the Baroque pleasure garden or, as an oasis amid the city, the public garden – in Esslingen, namely the Maille and the Merkelpark.