The theme of Lehrner’s explorations is tales yet untold or unknown about the cities he has visited, about the worlds that once were or still exist today, but are not experienced true to what they really are. Lehrner’s works may as well be seen as records of the art of performance, since the artist frequently finds himself in situations that require physical exertion, if his work is to adequatly present what he seeks to show.
The exhibition is unique for the way in which Wolfgang Lehrner investigates and presents societal, historical, social, individual and collective factors. They all both exist and do not exist; they live in some people’s stories and memories, but are completely unknown to others, while jointly constituting this world, which is both true to and different from how we experience it. Just as these photography series are composite mosaics of carefully selected frames showing particular cities, all those cities taken collectively make a single world map.
In his Banja Luka exhibition Wolfgang Lehrner will present several of his photography and video cycles: Medineo, Standard City, Ciudad sin Nombre, VIE CEE, etc.
Curator of the exhibition WORLD/CITY is Mladen Banjac and the project is realised with support of Austrian Cultural Forum and Ministry of Education and Culture of Republika Srpska.
The observation and visualization of local determined characteristics of cities, the spaces between them, and the resulting global transformability run through Wolfgang Lehrner’s works. Cosmopolitan in his investigations, the artist responds to the change and the importance of seemingly insignificant similarities, as well as the opposition of urban areas, cities and their networking in the cultural, socio-economic, historical and metaphysical sense. In his way of working Lehrner consciously uses coincidence to determine the direction of aimless drifting, headed by the respective routes, squares, streets and places. The resulting cinematic portraits of everyday urban life are essentially results of the search for the particular.