17.12.2024 – 19.12.2024 & 07.01.2025 – 30.01.2025
Advertising is annoying for most people, and we simply try to block it out in our everyday lives. But it’s not that easy to avoid this phenomenon; it is forced upon us dozens of times a day without us ever giving our consent. By training ourselves to look away, many places become interchangeable non-places: We have to pass through them, but don’t want to stay in them. At the same time, our longing for wilderness in everyday life often encounters well-planned areas where hardly anything is left to chance. For the most part, only the adverts refer to something different, new and desirable, which we then – subconsciously – perceive. Our feelings are appealed to in order to entice us to consume more or to advertise parties. We do not reflect on whether what is advertised is attainable for us or remains a wish that creates a feeling of emptiness in us, but the fantasies of advertising shape our desires. Does this really have to stand in our way? Following presentations of photographic research on the representability of nature and wilderness, off_gallery is concluding its annual programme with a documentary-activist exhibition on public space in Graz. To this end, they are collaborating with the Werbefrei association. Leonhard Rabensteiner, one of the founders of the association, is documenting advertising in Graz for this exhibition and wants to show the absence of what could be in its place.
Leonhard Rabensteiner – Standing in the way
17.12.2024 – 19.12.2024 & 07.01.2025 – 30.01.2025
off_gallery / raum
Griesgasse 31 / Griesgasse 26
8020 Graz
www.offgallery.at
