Mathias Poledna’s film works can provoke disorientation, even frustration, best explained by the fact that they are built on misunderstanding. Typically pertaining to pivotal moments in modern popular culture, they shuffle and dim the formative elements of their referents, leaving some expectations raised by their aesthetics unfulfilled. It looks like pop, but the artwork does not pass as pop. Instead, it dissects how modernity historically articulates and dreams itself through an ever-expanding field of media.
Film is Poledna’s core artistic medium; thus, at the heart of his recent exhibition at Halle für Kunst Steiermark in Graz is a new work on film, My Favorite Shop (2024), which strikes a chord similar to that of his cinematic works previously exhibited elsewhere. For instance, one of his earliest and most exemplary films, Actualité (2002), illustrates a neuralgic episode in pop music: the post-punk movement of the early 1980s, where the counterculture of punk was morphing into something more ritualized and self-reflexive. Consistent with the musical reference, the actors’ and musicians’ clothing style alludes to what eventually evolved into high fashion, thanks to designers like Vivienne Westwood. Placing the band in the black cube conjures a filmic format that slowly gathered speed around that time: the music video. (MTV was launched in 1981). Another preceding work, Imitation of Life (2013), follows a cartoon donkey figure in a classic sailor costume through a brief Disney-esque musical sequence. The donkey’s cute but generic celebratory performance seems like a metaphor for the technological triumph of animation and the mass reproduction of an age-old idea of animism.
Poledna’s films, while heavily referential, appear disconnected from their immediate context, which can leave the viewer disoriented. The artist counters this with a reliable formal structure: the works have comparable length, are projected from analog film, include a soundtrack and often also a fashion reference, and appear as loops. His highly professionalized and costly mode of production seems dissonant with the movie-clip-like outcome, but this mimicry makes sense as an examination of the referenced technological structure.
In Graz, the exhibition is divided architecturally into five distinct parts, but the thematic divisions are less evident. The main gallery is split lengthwise by a newly constructed wall. On its left side, the space remains empty—or, rather, displays only its own basic architecture. This reads as a nod to institutional critique, with the museum itself becoming yet another modernist trope on display. My Favorite Shop (2024), commissioned for the exhibition, is projected onto the other side of the wall, with the projector installed in a separate side room. This matters, since it not only evokes a classic cinema floor plan, but also showcases the large analog 35mm projector itself as a historical object, on a plinth with a wall label.The film unfolds as a classic fashion runway scenario, featuring two female models and intense club music. The soundtrack is an electronic remix (by Poledna) of a 1960s song by the psychedelic folk duo Wendy & Bonnie. The models’ repetitive back-and-forth pacing emphasizes both the stylistic choice of looping and a sense of infinity or atemporality.
The simple silk garments they wear evoke 1920s flapper dresses, but also the minimalism of iconic designers such as Raf Simons (notably his time as creative director for Jil Sander, from 2005 to 2012). Their formal banality reveals the cyclical nature of modernity’s looks—one of Poledna’s essential stylistic arguments. A distinctive detail in the design of the slip dresses are long belts made of a silky fabric, held in place by two small metallic belt loops. The belts are variously looped through the front and back, tied or unraveled. Rendered useless, they perform the logic of styling in fashion. Amid the circular movements and dynamic camerawork, which suggest high-end equipment, the monochromatic color shifts of the clothes give the loop its own rhythm.
At the end of the film, with the final color shift to red, a striking moment and decisive motif for the exhibition occurs: one of the models carries a replica of a severed male head. This moment seems most likely inspired by Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608), although renderings of Judith and Holofernesor David and Goliath by the likes of Cranach, Botticelli, and Mantegna also come to mind. The iconography of the severed head usually points to a dramatic shift in power, and with this vanitas motif, Poledna touches on a fundamental topic in fashion theory. Already in 1824 the Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi staged a fictional dialogue between fashion and death: “If we ran a race together, I hardly know which of us would win.”1 Fashion’s very nature implies a constant fading and return of trends, like revenants or the undead. The human head as a fashion accessory reminds us that clothes are inanimate objects, capable of coming to life only when worn; ultimately, though, they also enhance the body’s vitality and add traits to the human figure. The Surrealists were fascinated by this relation between fashion and death, making works with mannequins as lifeless, industrially produced imitations of the body (Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Giorgio de Chirico, to name a few examples), and blending features of animated core and lifeless shell.
Gucci’s Fall/Winter 2018 collection, where some models carried replicas of their own heads, seems a likely blueprint for My Favorite Shop. Unlike in Poledna’s film and Caravaggio’s painting, however, Gucci’s heads were not dangling by their hair but cradled in the models’ arms, as if they were tenderly caring for their own mortality. In both cases, the replicas were rendered with eerily lifelike detail, reminiscent of wax figures. The morbid association with a handbag may explain the somewhat cryptic title, My Favorite Shop, as a pun on a shopping bag, and opens up an underlying Marxist reading of the human body as doomed to become a commodity.
Aesthetically, despite—or perhaps because of—its appropriations, My Favorite Shop fits within the visual frameworks of the fashion industry. Yet through its cinematic execution, iconographic references, veiled contemporaneity, and formal restraint, it alienates the subject and aligns it with a broader collective societal memory of the genre. This moment of estrangement from fashion and its reflexivity brings it closer to the realm of art. A crucial part of this shift is Poledna’s personal artistic touch, ever-present beneath the polished surface of professionalized production. The plot, outfits, music, and lyrics are not copies but rather reinterpretations of existing elements—a process that is more creative than merely technical, adding an essential artistic dimension to the otherwise analytical structure. Poledna’s approach is not a vast assemblage of footage and signifiers that create modern, almost mythical storms à la Alexander Kluge. The artist rather constructs a very contained surface, analogue to how modernity articulates itself, while beneath it, labor looms large. It is notable, then, that in this exhibition, he avoids focusing on a single industry, instead showing his repertoire and connecting various sequences of supposed cultural key moments.
In the apse of the Halle für Kunst, a single tapestry is displayed by Poledna: Örtagården, designed by Märta Måås-Fjetterström in 1928 and woven in 1988 by Birgit Svensson and Birgith Nilsson in Fjetterström’s still-active workshop. In the basement, he shows a series of archival photographs related to Europe’s postwar automobile industry. Both installations represent a moment of introspection on the part of the respective industry. The temporal gap between the rug’s design by Fjetterström and its posthumous production raises questions about authorship in weaving, which today is associated more with craft than with industrial production. This doubles down on a key question in modern industrial development, namely the junction between artisanry and industry, and the role of female labor in it. Women, historically disenfranchised and suffering under appalling work conditions, were at the heart of the textile industry during the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, Fjetterström’s blend of traditional motifs and modernist elements resembling early computer graphics ties into an ongoing discourse on the origins of computer technology in weaving.
The unauthored black-and-white framed archival photographs (all Untitled (circa 1963–72), [2022]) depict stages of a manufactured car prior to completion, and the found object of a vintage Michelin tire is suspended from the ceiling at the center of the room. The consecutive, almost cinematic lineup of the photographs and the circular form of the Michelin tire at their center insinuates something, it seems, about the film projector and the creation of motion pictures. If we spin this further and imagine a film projector figuratively stringing and weaving images, it brings us back to the concept of the loom. In a seemingly generic but ultimately poetic manner, Poledna builds loops of mediation until the exhibition becomes a hall of mirrors reflecting a socioeconomic subconscious, like a fledgling artificial intelligence.
at Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz
until November 21, 2024
Mathias Poledna (b. 1965, Vienna) has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne (2022); Galerie Buchholz, New York (2020); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014); the Art Institute of Chicago (2014); the Austrian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Secession, Vienna (2013); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2012); Raven Row, London (2011); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2010); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2010); the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2009); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2009); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2006); Galerie Buchholz, Cologne (2006); Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2005); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2004); Mumok – Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna (2003); Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2002); and Grazer Kunstverein, Austria (2001). He is based in Los Angeles.
Benjamin Hirte is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Vienna.