“Kunst und Wein”, 23. & 24. August 2025, Haugsdorf, A

On the 30th anniversary of Art and Wine, the exhibition entitled MODUS pays homage to the tradition of lively communication between art and wine production, embedded in the nature and architecture of the cellar lane.

With works by:
Elisabeth Czihak
Amina Handke
James Lewis
Angelika Loderer
Anna Pöll
Gregor Titze
Lois Weinberger
Fridolin Welte

Topography Disc #8 (2024)
Ceramic disc on steel rod, digital and analogue fusion of a fictive landscape, materials from Jetzelsdorf (A)

Topography as Cultural Construct

Ceramic discs mounted on several-meter-long steel rods pendulate gently through space. Their relief surfaces display fictional topographies without geographic reference points – abstract landscape models that question conventional cartographic and perceptual patterns through objects unbound to any real location.

The edition of 10 discs emerge from local material: sand and clay extracted directly from an old clay pit in Jetzelsdorf. This material history connects the work to the region's geological past. The Weinviertel was once part of an ancient sea – marine sediments formed today's landscape, where loess and clay provide the foundation for viticulture.

Landscape is never neutral. Every topographic representation – whether maps, relief models, or digital visualizations – is permeated by cultural codings, political interests, and aesthetic conventions. Western cartographic tradition has developed specific representational modes: the bird's-eye view, contour line representation, abstraction through symbols. These conventions fundamentally shape our understanding of space.

The ceramic discs function as experimental arrangements: What happens when we encounter relief structures that correspond to no known geographic reference point? Which projection mechanisms are activated? Human perception is programmed to recognize familiar patterns in irregular surfaces. Neuroscientific studies show that our visual system automatically interprets topographic structures according to known schemas: valleys, hills, mountain ridges, Haugsdorf. The discs become projection surfaces for individual spatial memories and culturally shaped landscape images. Simultaneously, through their abstraction, they refuse clear attributions and create moments of uncertainty. The 42 cm diameter discs operate deliberately with an indeterminate scale. The reliefs could represent detailed views of a few square meters or entire continents. This scalelessness opens a space for reflection on the relativity of spatial perception.

The history of cartography is characterized by tension between empirical measurement and imaginative projection. Medieval world maps integrated mythological beings and paradisiacal territories. Even modern satellite maps are selective interpretations of electromagnetic data shaped by algorithms and aesthetic decisions. These fictional territories connect to this ambivalent tradition, functioning as "maps without land" – topographic models that depict no real geography yet provoke familiar readings. Mapping is always also an act of appropriation. Colonial cartography functioned as an instrument for appropriating unknown territories. Borders are not merely depicted by maps but created through them. These fictional territories evade such power structures through their refusal of concrete references. They create spaces without names, without borders, without ownership relations.

The pendulating discs respond to air currents, spatial height, and visitor movement through the cellar lane. Their instability becomes a conceptual principle: these "drunken" landscapes on thin rods refuse fixed positions. They sway between states – between above and below, between map and object, between precision and indeterminacy. The term "Hanglage" (slope position) gains double meaning: as viticultural terminology describing vineyard inclination and as physical description of the tilted, mobile discs.

The decentralized distribution throughout the entire cellar lane creates an alternative orientation system. The fictional territories overlay the existing spatial configuration of the cellar lane, establishing a navigation system that oscillates between traditional cartography and spatial imagination. They deconstruct the self-evidence of landscape perception and open new readings of topographic information.

The installation functions as an experimental arrangement for the question: How does spatial orientation constitute itself beyond functional necessities? Can abstract topographic models develop their own navigational logics? Where other positions claim specific spaces, these mobile landscapes scatter through every available location, creating a nomadic counter-concept to fixed spatial allocation.