Transit Interior

In both her photographic and sculptural work, Lucie Stahl explores the highly abstracted relationship of humans to their environment, and to other life forms. She sheds light on the abysses of those mechanisms that underpin the consumer societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her interest lies in a culture of extraction, in obsessive use and wear, in overproduction and related modes of production, processing, and consumption—that is, mechanisms of suction, pumping, flow, and of the conversion of liquid resources into energy.

For the exhibition Transit Interior at Camera Austria, Lucie Stahl’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria, the artist takes as her point of departure photographs made during a trip to the United States in 2013. Momentary impressions taken while riding in a car, in which different times—the bygone, the present, and the future waiting down the road ahead—coincide, are accompanied by large-format scanned works suggestive of landscapes. Visitors delve into an interstitial space that sketches the interior of a vehicle or of a cinema; almost palpable in this space are the inscrutable depths behind (not only) American car culture. Charged stereotypes of the American landscape with its intrinsic sublimity collide with a culture of supposed “endless freedom” characterized by individualism. The fascination of these aspects comes to a standstill in an era of climate change, with the visible, inescapable consequences of the extractivism that makes all this possible.