Søren Engsted & Christoph Meier - Bananasplit

Bridge to the Needle
Opening with my own private cinema: 7pm, 2nd March, Needle/Space04

What makes a non-place perceptible? And how do you get to perceive it, normally without you noticing? Søren Engsted (Vienna, Copenhagen) and Christoph Meier (Vienna) were commissioned to do a work for the staircase of the Kunsthaus, their first joint work. They set about the question so their different approaches to sculpture would come into play. They designed a project that uses a performative act to appropriate and define a place, following the logic of Marc Augé. In the social performance Bananasplit, visitors’ eyes are caught by a pile of banana skins as they enter the building. But only after coming out of the exhibitions, on leaving the building by the otherwise nondescript staircase, is the puzzle solved, and visitors are gradually drawn into a performative piece. Up in the Needle, they are already able to pick up a poster with theoretical musings about the work of Christoph Meier, and another poster of a crumpled print by Søren Engsted. Then in the stairwell they are given a banana. Visitors then become participants in an amusing “passage piece” depending on what they do and decide about the “gift” – whether to accept it or not, eat it or not, and dump the skin on the table provided or not. As part of a series of projects that will make more use of the Kunsthaus Graz staircase, the opening project has revealed with humour and a sharp eye basically what this space has to offer, and worked it up into a performative sculpture that investigates formal aspects of architecture, and aspects of movement and perception.