Sabine Folie, photo: Elodie Grethen
Dear Friends of the Academy Art Collections!
Now that summer has drawn to a close, we are delighted to welcome you back for an exciting autumn at the Academy. The exhibition A Vista on Italy and France was a major attraction over the hot summer days in particular, with Francesco Guardi’s refreshing views of Venice and many other highlights from 16th and 17th century France and Italy. The showcase was organised to mark the publication in 2025 of a comprehensive inventory catalogue of the works of the Romanesque schools in the Painting Gallery’s collection.
We made good use of the summer to make further progress towards becoming a climate-friendly museum by renovating the windows of the Paintings Gallery, thereby implementing a more efficient and gentler air conditioning.
And so we are now well equipped as we head into the autumn and present once again an exciting contemporary Insert as part of our series Considering the Collection & An Insert by ..., this time featuring the Belgian artist Ana Torfs. Needless to say, the highlights from the collection of the Paintings Gallery will of course be on show once again.
Ana Torfs’s conceptual approach to her work usually involves a search for clues. Her meticulous research draws on image-based and written sources from historical, cultural, ethnological, cinematic and scientific contexts. These sources are not just the starting point for her research: once transposed into other media and poetically enhanced, they are usually incorporated, i.e. ‘built into’ her works. Thematically, they are often situated within the world view of a dominant West and its various forms of appropriation of ‘other’ cultures – their ‘seizure’, monopolisation and even approval of destruction – in favour of the idea of progress. The voice, song, and straight theatre are frequently used to make the human voice heard, in the sense of adopting a position, and make historical testimony present in its embodiment.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, what constitutes and sustains a social community was challenged in a particular way: the world in a state of emergency, a paradoxical interweaving of suppressing the individual for the benefit of the community, which simultaneously is sacrificed. It comes as no surprise, then, that under these circumstances this thoughtful artist found a way to combine the specific situation of personal introspection with a reflection on the state of the world in its unrelenting crisis and the permanent evidence of media-based news broadcasts. On her solitary walks, Ana Torfs collected autumn leaves and re-read Virgil’s Aeneid and the Sibyl’s prophecies, which were written down on leaves. Torfs dried her leaves between pages of newspaper print and then photographed a selection of them in purposeful snippets against a backdrop of 21th century news sheets – a medium that may well be dying out – before combining them with the artist’s own thoughts in verse. As such, they evoke a sort of chorus not unlike those of classical Antiquity in their solemnity. The repetitive refrain – ‘The day you ...’ – connects a personal chronicle with the present. By weaving – Latin: texere – the text-based fabric into a tapestry, the choir body acquires a density and weight that counteracts the fleeting nature of autumn’s ‘flighty’ leaves and the ephemeral nature of quotidian newsprint. The Sibyl’s enigmatic ‘news items’ were reduced to indecipherable scraps of text by the gusts of wind, thus becoming a memento of a possibly significant historical moment of unpredictable implications and uncertain outcome.
Coinciding with the exhibition is a publication and, as always, themed lectures as part of our series Lektionen / Lessons. All that remains now is for us to wish you a pleasant start to the autumn with Ana Torfs’s gathered leaves. There are plenty of surprises in store.
Sabine Folie
Director
and the team of the Art Collections
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna