Listen to the quiet voice

When nylons became available also for the average american woman in the end of the 1950’s, and when they celebrated a world wide triumph with the mini skirts, this also marked the entrance of american everyday culture in europe. From that time on nylons also requested their tribute of female beauty on a broad level. At the same time the fragile weaving of the nylons implies a constant threat of a possible run or a hole, a synonym for vulnerability which can shift attraction into embarassment from one moment ot the other. „listen to the quiet voice“ reflects the various roles attributed to women in the east and the west on the example of the object which recently has been dominating discussions on the islam and which also raised questions concerning our understanding of culture, the headscarf. Barbara holub produced four headscarfs out of used nylons for the project. The artist refers to the complex meaning of the headscarf which used to be omnipresent in europe up to the 1960’s in varying roles between fashion, tradition and protection, thus showing the current cultural hybridity which is undergoing ongoing changes.

The performers for the posters are four female personalities, who all have a different relationship to islam, all living in austria. The posters were affiched on stands which are usually used for election campaigns and distributed in the area of the regionale08 in Styria (Southern Austria). This „silent election campaign“ quotes the formula of a political activity, deconstructing this formula by blanking out possible slogans which are usually general, shallow and without significance. The blank textbars create a space for projecting possible visions beyond categorization and one-dimensional ideologies, taking a position for the grey zone of contradiction.

The title of the piece refers to „Oblique Strategies“, a series of cards which Brian Eno/ Peter Schmidt published in 1975 for the first time. These give instructions how to evade deadlocked situations or dilemmas.

The performers are:

"Orientierungen"
regionale 2008
Kunsthalle Feldbach

curated by: Alexandra Riewe

"Alcanzando il luz"
Banco Nacional, Panama,
curated by: Ursula Maria Probst

Gulsen Bal
visual artist, theoretician and works as an intellectual worker. serbian/bosnian parents, grew up in turkey, studied in london, where she lives and works. atheist. with the aim to create a facility for contemporary creative practice concerned with contributing model strategy for cross-border dialogue, she moved to  vienna and initiated "open space" in 2008, since she is programmatically interested in issues between the East and the West.

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Mehru Jaffer
Indian Muslim journalist, living in Austria since 1982. Her interest in religion is both academic and spiritual. As a writer she is most interested in the politics of the day and its relationship to inter cultural issues.

Barbara Wally
Art historian, curator and author; declared feminist; director of the Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg (1981-2008). Converted to islam in 2007, relocated to Yemen in 2009.

installation at the regionale 08, 2008