2Fold designates an ongoing process of a parallel act that discovers each other in the inquiry of doing. Two artists with different approaches and visual languages fold and unfold ideas of doing. Hence, they materialize this process with the use of paper. The act of folding always leaves a crease in paper; any other following act could never erase it. It is in the crease that new forms and questions emerge. Lace and Neustetter explore what happens in the crease as a place for revealing that which is hidden as well as that which is speculated and imagined.
Prompted by the method of psychological inkblot testing, Lace employs multiple Rorschach style folds to create this exhibition, while Neustetter is focusing of the process of making the paper, the mark, the attempts for folded form, the map that frames, the line that defines the edge, the paper edge that defines the end.
Calligraphy ink in varying consistencies is carefully applied and pressed into cotton rag paper. Lace enjoys the tension between definitude and chance in the process of creating these works as her hands and eyes can never be in full control of the results. Ultimately, the symmetry of each mark reminds us of forms of life, from the inner organ to the insect to the human. The process and resulting imagery gives birth to infinite readings.
On the other hand, Neustetter’s contemplation is on the fragility of how we are still standing, at the tipping point of near collapse, our individual worlds that could cave-in at any moment, the shifting and blurring of border lines on maps, the distorting perspective, the twisting landscape, the vertical portals searching for hope, and the raw solitude as a planet.
Furthermore, both artists use mirrored and manipulated objects, footage, alphabets, morphology, syntax, semantics, and responsive vocal components. They create a unique audial and visual code to communicate their work. In this line of thinking, the exhibition has seven interconnected chapters. As a performative venture, one of the chapters is dedicated to the undertakings of “the Zone”. Based in Vienna, the Zone is a transdisciplinary collective operates across the arts and sciences. The collective draws their convergent practices together by taking the act of folding and unfolding as a focal point in this chapter.
A collective artist book with limited edition will be published and launched during the exhibition by Art Rooms.
Bronwyn Lace is a visual artist, whose focus is on the collaborative relationships between art and other fields, including physics, history, museology, philosophy and literature. Site specificity, responsiveness and performativity are central to her practice. In 2016 Lace joined William Kentridge in the founding and animating of the “Centre for the Less Good Idea” in Johannesburg, today Lace is the Centre’s steering force and its international liaison arm. In 2020 Lace co-founded “The Zone”: a Vienna-based collective that inquires and curates across the arts and sciences and beyond.
Marcus Neustetter is interested in cross-disciplinary practice, site-specificity, socially engaged interventions and the intersection of art and activism. Neustetter has produced artworks, projects, performances and installations across Africa, Europe, America and Asia. As artistic director, facilitator, researcher and strategist to various creative industry areas, he finds himself building opportunities and networks that develop interest beyond his personal artistic practice into seeking entrepreneurial and alternatively cultural ecosystems through his 20-year collaboration with Stephen Hobbs as “The Trinity Session”. Neustetter is an adjunct professor with the Nelson Mandela University.
Başak Şenova is a curator and designer. Currently, she holds Senior Postdoctoral Researcher position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with her PEEK project “The Atlas” (2022-2026), awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
