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  In Hand | 2015

In Hand In Hand is an outcome of the artist’s continuous engagement with the economic conditions and social frames of production enabling the art work, its influence and exchange with the everyday life as well as the shifting politics and power relations within the public space. The installation is a peak into these practices, combining several on-going works. The works Whistle While We Work, Spine and Action Design form a triangle of relations of meaning, a stage for examining the economy of everyday life, work and free time and the possible autonomy of art practice within it. The photograph Whistle While We Work (one from an extensive series) is an outcome of Margan’s involvement as a ‘black’ worker on one Viennese construction site of a luxurious fashion design shop in the Vienna´s Golden Quarter in the first district. During the time of her work there, she documented the physical labour and spatial changes done on the site. In this on-going body of work, the relationship between the concrete physical work and the immaterial production of values is examined; looking at the dead labour of the worker on one hand, and the zombification of work of the cultural workers, the artist, on the other. The photograph shows workers only as mere reflections in the black marble walls of the fashion store where the construction site was set, an insight into the disappearing manual work and the commodification of public space. The artist employs found objects in the installation. The Spine embodies the heritage of the factory labour, the symptoms of its failure and it’s spaces echoed today within the ‘new creative’. The rusty factory machine part was retrieved from one of the Viennese closed down factories (that is today serving as an artist studio), resting on the Italian marble boards collected from the Vienna`s Golden Quarter luxurious construction site. The industrial object dominates the marble, as if it is ready to scratch the precious material, reinforcing the idea of the eternal struggle to overcome the neoliberal means of production and reinvent social relations. In the work Action Design, a puppet torso with a shirt found its way from the local clothes design shop, into the pinacoteca exhibition room. This gesture is part of the artist on-going interest into the relation of art to fashion and design and its historical and often misunderstood efforts to revolutionize and improve the everyday life. One of these famous examples was the design of the La TuTa, designed by the Italian futurist Thayaht in the 1920, an overall outfit meant to be freeing the body, easy to make and affordable for all classes of man and women. Unfortunately, the design was not embraced within the wide population, only to soon become a hit within the high society. As a reference to this “mistaken” twist of purpose and use, Margan borrows a ready-made artefact from the local design store, an item produced by am artist/designer Gabriele Ring. This dark blue shirt is embedded with a pattern of golden ‘stains’ of paint that would be normally an outcome of an action-painter´s work while painting. The idea of the„artist at work”, is here turned into a deliberate fashion decor, a ‘cool’ life-style that one could own, if in no other way, than at least as a shirt to wear. In a somewhat self-ironic set of relations, it critically points towards the position of the artist(s) within the excessive bizarreness of the rhetoric of the creative business. In another room, a small Crassula ovata, popularly called The Money Tree (Geldbaum) is in the quiet process of ‘migrating’ from the artists’ house to the new home of the exhibition space, waiting for her roots to grow within a schnapps glass.