ORT-ATEM

Excerpt from the ORTART 2021 catalogue:

“The artists invited to ORTART 2021 — an.thon / Angelika Thon, Stefan Glettler, Daniel Hafner, SizeTwo, Stefanie Holler, Luise Kloos, Renate Krammer, Andrea Sadjak, Christian Strassegger, and Rebecca Unz — have long found their artistic language. For the exhibition, they created new works that now seek their place in and around the Stieglerhaus in St. Stefan ob Stainz. Each of them approached the given theme, Air, in their own way, resulting in ten works that could hardly be more different — a vivid testament to the diversity of contemporary visual art.”

https://stieglerhaus.at/ortart2021/

In Ort-Atem, the act of breathing—ordinary, automatic, and essential—is transformed into a sculptural and spatial experience. A network of pipes and balloons turns the attic of the Stieglerhaus into a mechanical lung. The installation expands and contracts in a slow, meditative rhythm, making the invisible movement of air perceptible as a physical, almost bodily presence in space. Breath becomes both material and metaphor: a subtle rhythm that connects human, architecture, and machine.

Air circulates, is displaced, compressed, and released, as if the building itself were alive. In an era defined by automation, environmental crisis, and the increasing mechanization of life, Ort-Atem turns attention to the fragility of what sustains us. The installation reflects on the growing interdependence between nature and technology, body and system. It evokes both harmony and unease—the beauty of rhythm, but also the unsettling awareness of how artificial that rhythm has become.

Through this shared rhythm, the work becomes an immersive meditation on existence itself: the constant exchange between inside and outside, control and surrender, stillness and flow.