Werner Feiersinger

• 16.05.–12.07.2025

Galerie Martin Janda is presenting Werner Feiersinger's photographs of utopian projects of industrial architecture and landscapes in Istria under the title KORZO from May 16 to July 12, 2025.

The sculptor and photographer has been working with post-war modernist buildings for many years. While he has so far mainly focused on the sculptural qualities of this architecture, in KORZO Feiersinger is concerned with conveying the topographies and atmospheres of specific places.

The residential buildings and architectural sculptures of post-war modernism as well as important monuments and places of remembrance in the former Yugoslavia have been extensively researched in recent years. The historical industrial buildings, on the other hand, have been almost completely overlooked, although these buildings tell us so much about the political and social developments of a transitional period. Feiersinger's photographs focus on this important period and its utopian potential, examining the specific landscapes in their relationship to the buildings.

The photographs show areas of tension and the relationships between the different types of architecture – industrial buildings and extraordinary residential buildings – and the quarries and natural landscapes. “The many industrial buildings – high-rise blocks, petrochemical plants, ships, coal depots, port warehouses, steel structures – tell of the history and development of these places, but also of the failure of political ideologies and utopias. The corresponding political background subtly resonates as a parallel narrative.” (Werner Feiersinger)

“At its core, KORZO is not a guide to Istria. While the glimpses Feiersinger provides have been shaped by the region’s political and ideological itineracy, it is not the artist’s intention to fix the territory in a single iteration. Rather he presents the material traces of these histories of extraction as raw materials, capitalizing on the unsettled qualities to combine and recombine their elements in new compositions. His is not an eye drawn to ‘dark imaginings,’ but one that restores dignity to the objects as aesthetic forms.” (Kate Sutton)

The photographs were taken for the Fourth Industrial Art Biennial Istria – Landscapes of Desire (2023). A selection of the works was shown at Fotohof Salzburg 2024. The eponymous publication KORZO with an essay by Kate Sutton was published by Fotohof>Edition.

Werner Feiersinger, *1966 in Brixlegg (AT), lives and works in Vienna (AT).