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Café Vienne ... full of spirits so free
“The coffeehouse gives you a space to dream,” goes a line from the coffeehouse song, which has been written and performed for the “queen of the coffee house,” author Gina Kaus (1893 Vienna – 1985 Los Angeles, USA). Isa Rosenberger commissioned the song, composed and performed by Tini Trampler and Stephan Sperlich, as an allusion to the “Wienerlied” of the 1920s. It can now be heard in “Café Vienne” at Charim Events, designed by Rosenberger for Gina Kaus, alluding to Vienna’s Café Herrenhof, which was a centre of the literary avant-garde in the interwar period, with the bestselling author at its centre. This emancipated free thinker is thus once again written into cultural memory, as an Austrian-Jewish-American writer and screenwriter in Hollywood.
In her exhibition, Isa Rosenberger broadens the scope of an homage and develops a narrative using video, research material, staging, music and collage.
In doing so, she reflects on the fact that memories are increasingly shaped by media. That is why they always have fictional parts, through which closed narratives are created, similar to secondary dream work. The concrete and fictional memory space of the exhibition is therefore consciously committed to the present. Isa Rosenberger’s artistic memory work is a reconstruction that takes a multiperspective approach to the present, in order to grasp multiple historical perspectives. She keeps her work as free as possible from explanations and assertions and makes history aesthetically tangible through the media-poetic forms of presentation she has chosen. In this sense, art happens and visitors are engaged by the combination of works. The exhibition is, seen in this way, similar to a real-time theatre event, with the aspiration that spaces of memory could also be spaces of experience in which we can find and consider our own roles. Exactly in the way that life histories gain their nuances and meaning as identity-creating sources of significance from their references to multifaceted life moments.
Kurt Kladler
July 2018