Christian Kaufmann

Christian Kaufmann’s artistic practice encompasses graphics, multimedia works, and objects. His productions always function as artificial prostheses, analyzing human-made applications and recontextualizing them as modified settings: everyday objects, concepts, or technologies are aestheticized and placed in an artificial context. His works are characterized by a subtle, layered quality; much is decoded and re-encoded through intelligent technical tools, creating a rupture between reason and emotion, rigidity and movement, as well as the artificial and the natural.

Kaufmann’s field of tension is the mysterious. He is not interested in visible surfaces, but in what lies beneath – exploring cryptologies to add new layers of meaning. In his artistic practice, he is never overt, but always discreet and calculated. Viewers experience only what the artist consciously constructs as bridges for understanding. In the interactive exhibition “meet me in the gallery”, his focus is on specifically installed objects borrowed from surveillance technology, questioning their underlying mechanisms. The exhibition space becomes a secure, eavesdrop-free environment: panels generate ultrasonic white noise that interferes with small microphones, particularly those on smartphones. Contact transducers produce vibrations that render conversations in the room unintelligible to laser scanners. Such high-tech and concealed practices, and the associated dynamics of power and powerlessness, form the basis of Christian Kaufmann’s artistic investigations. “meet me in the gallery” is the artist’s invitation to encounter him conceptually and sensorily – without physical presence, solely through what he has created – to explore, within a strictly reduced aesthetic, the boundaries of perception and technology, between control and loss of control.

Christian Kaufmann, born 1986 in Bolzano (IT). 2007/2008 – 2008: studied Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Salzburg. 2008/2009 – 2014/2015: studied Sculpture and Multimedia at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since 2010, freelance artist, lives and works in Margreid (IT).

The exhibition is curated by Lisa Trockner.

Photo: Oliver Jaist