Michaela Melián has specially designed her piece "Panorama" for the hall on the lower level of the Galerie im Taxispalais. It is based on the huge cyclorama in Innsbruck, painted in 1896 by the Munich painter Zeno Diemer. It is one of the last existing panoramic paintings of the 19th century. The panorama depicts the battle fought by Tyroleans against the French and the Bavarians on August 13, 1809 on the Bergisel, against the backdrop of the Inn valley and the City of Innsbruck. Ever since its unveiling, this panorama is one of Innsbruck's sites attracting the most visitors. "Panoramas have an appeal. It is to be found in the blend of static and simulated movement, of illusionary expanse and actual confinement." (Alfred Polgar, Panorama, in: Die Weltbühne, 1918).

Melián takes up the idea of the cyclorama in her installation. However, the images that she shows in her Panorama are of more recent origin. The artist photographed the motives herself while she was driving from Bavaria to Innsbruck and through Innsbruck and then transformed these pictures in further stages. Her general theme is the history and historiography of the landscape, of the mountains, roads, buildings and their inhabitants.

Melián's Panorama consists of a cylinder shape with a diameter of six meters that has been covered with canvas. The artist has, in a sense, placed a variation in abstract terms of a panorama in the glass-roofed hall of the Galerie. From the center of this "Panorama" recalling a stroboscope (a precursor to film), the artist projects slides showing drawings following the movement in a circular way. The drawings projected onto slides were created after photographs but they were not executed conventionally but rather sewn by machine. A continuous thread runs along the silhouettes of mountains, roads, trees, buildings and furniture. By means of a special dissolve technique, one projected image follows another, thereby drawing the onlookers into the motion – inside as well as outside of the cylinder. In this sense Melián's Panorama can be described as dynamic. It does not offer the beholder a panorama with different perspectives. Rather, the moving projections create an intricate web of history and topography.

"Seen from the perspective of the self-understanding of pop culture which combines music, pictorial culture and art in its practice, Michaela Melián uses everyday and widely familiar materials to construct an analytic piece that is both haptic and conceptual. ›Soft‹ or ›fluid‹ paintings based on formal principles recalling Claes Oldenburg are combined with more recent critical methods with specific references to a specific place and context analysis, subverting established interpretations of objects, symbols and history." (Dirk Snauwaert in: exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Bremen 2001)

Michaela Melián lives in Bavaria and is a member of the FSK band.

Lecture
Jochen Bonz, The Red and the Silk Thread. Deconstructivist and Constructivist Aspects of Installations by Michaela Melián
Friday, February 21, 2003, 7 p.m.

House Extravaganza, Diskjockey: Thomas Meineke

Bookpresentation
Georg Decristel: weg bewegen. moving away
Tuesday, March 11, 2003, 7. p.m.

Georg Decristel
weg bewegen. moving away
160 p., CD
€ 25,00/sfr 43,00
ISBN 3-7082-3118-X
Texts by Heinz Gappmayr, Heidi Grundmann, Bodo Hell, Friederike Mayröcker, Rosa Pock-Artmann, Ernst Trawöger und Liesl Ujvary, und einem Interview von Eva Schmidt mit dem Performance-Künstler Terry Fox.

Catalogue
Michaela Melián
TRIANGEL
Ed. Silvia Eiblmayr, Galerie im Taxispalais / Bettina von Dziembowski, Stiftung & Kunstverein Springhornhof, Nicolaus Schafhausen
Texts by Heike Ander, Jochen Bonz, Silvia Eiblmayr, Sabine Himmelsbach, Didi Neidhart, Dirk Snauwaert, Frank Wagner (German/English)
Verlag Lukas & Sternberg, Berlin / New York 2003
144 p., 138 images
€ 19.-
ISBN 0-9726806-2-4

Lecture
Isabelle Graw, Art Critique as a Discipline. On Editorial Criteria and Institutional Power Relations
Saturday, March 22, 6 p.m.

Catalogue presentation
Mats Hjelm and Michaela Melián following the lecture.