Bianca Kennedy: We're all in this together

Bianca Kennedy: We're all in this together

Schottenfeldgasse 45 Vienna, 1070, Austria Saturday, October 24, 2020–Saturday, January 30, 2021


Bianca Kennedy combines in her three-channel installation "We're all in this together" (2018), which was awarded the TOY-Berlin Masters Prize, over two hundred and fifty film clips in which the bathtub marks the location of a wide variety of actions. Although the function and meaning of the protagonist could be ascribed to the bathtub here due to its exposed focus, it acts more as a stage on which we encounter various types of human behavior and moods and thus ultimately ourselves. Personal hygiene becomes a minor matter here. It is the existential themes that are brought before our eyes in the excerpts: Birth, sexuality and death, in between scenes from life with all its facets: In the tub, people read, write, splash, dive, drink, smoke, smoke pot, kiss, love, laugh, sing, cry, mourn, argue, sleep, shoot and kill. Some of it alone, sometimes as a couple or in a larger group. Much in color, some in black and white. Sometimes in a luxurious ambience, sometimes in dirty water, sometimes during the day, sometimes under neon light. The bare skin is omnipresent. But we also encounter all kinds of curiosities and peculiarities: A telephoning teddy bear (Ted, 2012), an ice-eating mermaid (Aquamarine, 2016) or even the attack of eerie creatures in a cozy wet area (A Nightmare on Alm Street, 1984) illustrate the fusion of fantasy and reality in the film. The series "Portraits of taking a bath in movies" (2016 - 2020) complements the visual examination of the bathtub as a theme.   In the drawings on Japanese tissue paper, the artist uses fineliner and brushmarker to approach selected film scenes. Here, however, the styles serve as the object of artistic interpretation. With lively and rhythmic strokes, Kennedy translates the original into her own handwriting. It is to be attested to the attempt to reproduce the depicted persons at least to the extent that associations with the film remain clear. The figures remain largely colorless. The backgrounds are rather hinted at or develop from colored ornamentation. In this way, the artist not only alienates the original scene, but also its former mood and character. The third element of the exhibition will be the virtual reality experience "VR we're all in this together" (2018). Here Kennedy combines her drawings into virtual three-dimensional space and offers visitors an immersive bathing experience. The 360° animation now enables the viewer to leave his place as a voyeur, get into the tub himself and take a bath with six different film characters simultaneously. In her artistic approach, Kennedy thus detaches the 3 works / work series of already existing sequences from their dramaturgical context in order to re-contextualize them through thematic sorting and dialogue. In doing so, it generates a new image that seems strangely familiar to us and makes it clear that we all - regardless of our respective experiences - fall back on a collective image archive. This is how - to take up the title "We're all in this together".