Elke Krystufek: A Film Called Wood woof Woolve

A Film Called Wood woof Woolve Vulvahoodmoodsuperwoovertrooper

Transit Art Space is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Austrian artist Elke Krystufek, featuring her new film A Film Called Wood, together with new paintings and drawings related to the film. Also featured are her sculpture Cunt-Tiki and the paintings Johnny had June and Josef, Yusuf, Bas, previously shown in her solo exhibition Liquid Logic. The Height of Knowledge and the Speed of Thought, at MAK Museum in Vienna 2007-08.

A Film Called Wood is the sequel to Dr. Love on Easter Island, featured in the MAK exhibition. A Film Called Wood continues the search for the late Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea in 1975 during a performance where he attempted to cross the Atlantic in a boat only 13 feet small. In A Film Called Wood we meet the angel Bas, together with other angels and characters, among them the angel Virginia, relating to Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s novel The Waves forms another background for A Film Called Wood, with its lack of a progressing story, and with floating characters only defined by their words. A Film Called Wood is set in different locations, including Stavanger, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna and southern India. Different actors play the same roles in the different locations. All actors are amateurs, related to the art world in general or specifically to Elke Krystufek.

Bas Jan Ader’s attempted Atlantic crossing was meant to be part of a performance called In Search of the Miraculous. In the exhibition in Transit, Elke Krystufek links Ader’s voyage to the Norwegian adventurer and scientist Thor Heyerdahl, and his famous Kon-Tiki expedition from Peru to Polynesia in 1947. Elke Krystufek’s own wooden raft, called Cunt-Tiki, has an emblematic cunt painted on its sail instead of Thor Heyerdahl’s Inca god, thus proclaiming her own feministic endeavour to search for new knowledge – or to search for the miraculous.

Elke Krystufek (b.1970) works and lives in Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Ulmer Museum, Ulm, MAK Museum, Vienna, Nicola von Senger Galerie, Zurich. Recent group exhibitions include Prague Triennale and GlobalF eminism, Brooklyn Museum.

Elke Krystufek
A Film Called Wood woof Woolve Vulvahoodmoodsuperwoovertrooper