NARRATIVE BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY AND DISGUISE
Birgit Laback
(...) Time Gates was conceptualized as a traveling exhibition. On each station a new piece will be produced that references local conditions. In Vienna the piece was Künstlerbrot: a 2kg artwork made out of crystal glass that references the Viennese coffee house and bakery tradition. Twelve transparent loafs of bread are set on a table and illuminated from below. What we find here, instead of sweet patisseries, is the hard won bread of an artist, which must furthermore be shared with others from the art world. The fragility of the material and the noble display design are charged with irony by the commonness of the motif itself. Because of its divergent formal language Künstlerbrot can be read as an installation within the installation of the Time Gate series.² This time however, it is the artist who has contributed something of her own, even without interviews. Doesn’t it miss transparency? Künstlerbrot also references the specificity of the culture of language. We feel the urge to make sense of the world on a daily basis. Just like everyday practices or objects, (Das Schuhkästchen) language weaves a web of habits. Not everything is translatable into every language. (It so happens that the expression “Künstlerbrot” is incomprehensible in many languages – Chinese for example.³) But the way in which reality is constructed is decisive. Although reality makes things visible (more transparent), in (medial) images, as in language, it can disguise the underlying structures. One is required to look at people and circumstances closely to achieve an understanding. This also applies to Piokowska’s works (between the narratives, the titles and the layered photographs as pars pro toto, to get to the correlation of it all) which depict a process. “Because it is always possible to order a process with more that one 'marker', to classify it, attribute and to decorate it ... (even when) a pattern of preferred reading exists: and it underlies ... the institutional, political and ideological order ...”⁴ Discourse can enable individuals and the society to depart from traditions and find new ways of looking at things.^Mark Three other pieces from the Times Gates series also demonstrate a divergent formal language. Their motifs are cut out along their contours thus relinquishing the depiction of their surroundings.

⁷ Three other pieces from the Times Gates series also demonstrate a divergent formal language. Their motifs are cut out along
their contours thus relinquishing the depiction of their surroundings.
⁸ Cf. James Elkins (Ed.), Is Art History Global, New York 2007, p.92ff.