Artfan @ Oracle Berlin

Cover of Artfan No 5: First Flight of a Woman Without Mechanical Help, Departure 7 p.m., Linda Bilda (with Ariane Müller), Vienna, 1985

Please note the upcoming exhibition of ARTFAN, an art magazine, published by one of our editors in the early nineties in Vienna.

Artfan
Opening on Saturday, April 11, at 7pm.
Exhibition: April 11 - May 10, 2015

Oracle Berlin
Lichtenrader Straße 49, 12049 Berlin

Artfan, published in Vienna between 1991 and 1996, stands out amongst art magazines of it's time. Consisting of long-form interviews accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations, with an overwhelming amount of details and a Situationist anti-copyright stance, it resembled a music fanzine, all the more so as it contains no indication of the editorship. Only a few of the contributions are signed by name, but the longer is the list of artists that have a say in it, seemingly unedited.

Interviews with Andrea Fraser, Martin Kippenberger, Marina Abramovic, Jutta Koether, Mark Dion or Donald Judd alternate alongside photo-stories covering the war in former Yugoslavia, or a feminist critique of constructions of bohemia.

The exhibition at Oracle was conceived by Ariane Müller - who published Artfan together with Linda Bilda - in cooperation with Bärbel Trautwein and Daniel Herleth. It traces the conditions of interconnectedness, production and communication within the art scene shortly predating, and during the dawn of, the Internet, largely focusing around Cologne, New York, and Vienna, experienced as periphery. The exhibition comprises of models, video presentations, original materials and letters from the time.

A reader containing a selection of interviews and other contributions from Artfan will be published for the occasion of the exhibition.

Artforum, April 2015, critics picks , by Barbara Buchmaier