Experience the Immersive Spatial Installation: Susi Jirkuff's 'Wild Wood' Exhibition

Susi Jirkuff's 'Wild Wood' exhibition is a spatial installation comprising wall drawings, projected animations, sculptural elements, and soundscapes. The work creates a life-size, walkable cinematic backdrop, exploring themes of illusion, reality, and societal limitations through a stylized, drawing-based aesthetic.

Susi Jirkuff's exhibition 'Wild Wood' was conceived as a spatial installation that envelops visitors in a unique artistic environment. It features extensive wall drawings and wallpapers, animations projected onto geometric forms, and abstract sculptural elements complemented by soundscapes, collectively forming a large-scale, walkable cinematic set. A central piece within this installation is Jirkuff's three-part video animation, 'Boyz in the Wood' (2013). In her characteristic minimalist and stylized visual language, Jirkuff playfully engages with the techniques used to create cinematic illusions, crafting a distinct, drawn media reality. The exhibition aims to draw viewers into its narrative, allowing them to move within a film-like setting where the arrangement of space makes the story immediate. Jirkuff uses classic cinematic framing techniques, such as wide shots and close-ups, to structure the individual rooms as scenes within a film. The video 'Boyz in the Wood' features three comically stylized tree faces engaged in a grotesque conversation, reflecting on the discrepancy between the ideal of boundless possibility and the reality of individual and societal restrictions. The rooted, immobile tree symbolizes this antagonism, unable to move even if it desired. A sketched bus stop on the wall further evokes associations with departure, longing, waiting, and desolation. The title is a direct reference to John Singleton's 1991 film 'Boyz n the Hood,' which depicted life in South Central L.A. Jirkuff uses the film's context to transfer her observations on social circumstances and limited options for change into an absurd, surreal dialogue between static trees, highlighting a poignant yet ridiculous aspect of human aspirations. Jirkuff, who studied sculpture in Linz and London, frequently employs drawing, video animation, and spatial installations in her work. Her art explores the media construction of reality, the role of pop culture in identity formation, representations of urban life, anonymized spaces, and social isolation. Previous exhibitions, such as 'Rainy Days' (2012), also demonstrated a strategy of merging the exhibition space with fictional virtual realms through sophisticated staging and dramaturgy, using similar minimalist aesthetics in objects and wall drawings to create narratives of isolated characters.

The page provides a link to purchase tickets via 'eventjet.at/secession'. General information about visiting the Secession, including opening hours, is available on the site, but specific ticket prices or booking details for this exhibition are not detailed on this page beyond the general ticketing link.