Artist’s talk with Tom Morton: 23 April 2008, 7pm

The Story Cellar is a playground of ideas and innovations. In the basement gallery of the Austrian Cultural
Forum London, artist Johannes Vogl presents a series of inventions which don’t so much present solutions for
the world, as explore it, oscillating between functionality and fictive applications. As rain trickles down the only
window, it is never clear if this constant precipitation that Vogl has engineered in his installation “One Week of
Rain” serves any other purpose other than to invoke a feeling of melancholy, while opposite, a film shows a slice
of bread spread with jam on one side, perpetually rotating in slow motion, as if falling from a table. Whether the
slice falls face up or face down is only of concern to probability. As the bread continues to spin, forever
suspending fate, and rain continues to fall, defying all meteorological logic, this cellar of experimentation
illustrates how Vogl’s practice carefully observes the most mundane aspects of the everyday, providing them
with a space for playful imagination. During his residency in London, Vogl will also create a new performance
work, “30 Inch”. Simply, a figure stands on a child’s see-saw in a London park, balanced with a sack of sand on
the other side. As the figure begins to “relieve himself” and the body mass lessens, the figure rises. Mixing the
light-hearted and the provocative, this work embodies the calculated naivety of Vogl’s work.

Johannes Vogl, born 1981 in Kaufbeuren (Germany), lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. He is currently
studying at the Academies of Fine Arts, Vienna and Berlin-Weissensee and has exhibited widely with UTS
Gallery, Sydney; Pudelcollection, Hamburg; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Brunswick a.o., and is represented by
Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna. The Story Cellar is Vogl’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Tom Morton, contributing editor of frieze magazine, and co-curator of the 2008 Busan Biennale, will be leading
an artist’s talk with Vogl and the Visual Arts Platform curators Adriana Marques and Eva Martischnig on
Wednesday 23 April 2008, at 7pm.