Artist talk with Dr. Andrea Phillips: 9 May, 7 pm

The achievement of targets and goals seem to drive all our actions. Yet increasingly, strategies—that is the
plans, methods, or series of moves undertaken to obtain a specific objective—seem to be the buzzword of the
day. As every corner of our public and professional lives becomes focused on strategies and plans for delivery,
what has become more important—the final goal or the journey we take to get there? Artist collective mahony,
fresh from Vienna, will arrive in London for the first time to develop a new work which concentrates on actions
and process alone, investigating what happens when gestures are empty and freed from a final purpose. Like
explorers from the mountainous Alps, where landscape always marks polar directions, mahony will act as if in
a barren desert, liberated from any social or physical references, and will develop a plan to achieve nothing in
particular. This paradoxical project, where actions exist only for their own sake, will be developed during a ten
day residency at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, and asks us to consider: what happens when actions
have no reason? How do we react to the meaningless? And more importantly, can we live without goals?

mahony was founded by Andreas Duscha, Stephan Kobatsch, Clemens Leuschner and Jenny Wolka in 2001
in Vienna. The group’s fluid and conceptual work defies style or medium, utilising specific information from the
site of each project to locate their explorations or finished works on the threshold between fact and fiction, and
to create new experiences of familiar surroundings. Their recent exhibition “shabby moon, shine” was shown
at Gallery Layr Wüstenhagen, Vienna and they will exhibit at this year’s Vienna Art Fair. They have realized
numerous projects in Austria, some of them in public spaces. This will be mahony’s first exhibition in London.

Dr. Andrea Phillips, Assistant Director of MFA Curating and Director of the new Curating Architecture project,
Goldsmiths, will be leading a discussion with mahony and curators Adriana Marques and Eva Martischnig.