In 2011, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Joanneum founded by Archduke Johann, the main location of this first public museum in Austria - the Joanneum Quarter in Graz - was reopened in a new design. The conversion and expansion process became the focus of a project by the artist duo Ruth Anderwald and Leonhard Grond. They observed the successive changes as well as the uniqueness of the transforming site and explored the construction site with photographic means.
Accompanying the construction of the Joanneum Quarter, Anderwald + Grond published their artistic snapshots in the form of six eight-page photo supplements, which were distributed ten thousand times over by the Styrian daily newspaper Kleine Zeitung. The supplements show the construction progress from unusual perspectives and with surprising motifs.
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the completion of the Joanneum Quarter, the Institute for Art in Public Space Styria is publishing these pictorial supplements as a closed collection based on an idea by Alexandra Riewe. Even years after the completion of construction, the photographs by Anderwald + Grond show the multifaceted aspects of building and emphasize the multi-layered character of the transformation itself. In doing so, they link and thematize past, present, and future, or rather memory, immediate experience, and imagination, both artistically and medially.
