Kay Walkowiak (b. 1980, Salzburg, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
Walkowiak’s work concerns ideas of timeless idyllic spaces formed as a reflection upon the contrast between sociocultural and historical discourses.
For LB01, Kay Walkowiak showed as series of textile works and video work. Archival prints on textile, Rituals of Resistance refer to the early history of colonial visual ethnography in the beginning of the 20^th century, in which photography was used as a tool in qualitative research, the set up and composition of the photographs re-enacts a certain style of documentation. This work analyses and responds to the cultural legacies of colonialism and its visual culture by subverting its deep rooted power structures.
In the short film Anonymous Objects, five iconic modernist art objects tell the stories of their existence “living” in different places in the densely populated metropolis Hong Kong. As objects of a pre-colonial past, their present-day post-colonial identity crisis is expressed: they exist in a vacuum at the edge of schizophrenia, timeless, without location and without a redeeming end.
Walkowiak studied sculpture, multimedia and photography in Vienna. He has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions which include the Kunstpavillion Innsbruck (2012), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014), the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, the Soulangh Art Space in Tainan, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New Delhi and the Node Gallery in Tokyo