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all images from the exhibition What You Desire, ROSA RENDL
at 21er RAUM, 21er HAUS, Vienna, 2015

images courtesy of the artist and 21er RAUM, 21er HAUS, Vienna

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The 21er RAUM, 21er HAUS in Vienna is currently presenting a solo exhibition of Austrian artist ROSA RENDL entitled What You Desire. The show consists of ten large-scale photographs taken with her smartphone. According to the press release, RENDL‘s images are ‘staged photographs that imitate, or rather emulate, the pictorial language of social networks’.

Although the pictures convey feelings of closeness, intimacy and vulnerability, the exhibition is less a matter of expressing oneself than consuming a raft of entertainment that posits the viewer/ the user of social networks/ you and me / the artist, as a certain type of consumer: you don’t express who you are, but communicate a self according to the standards of social media in order to – unconsciously or not – generate an audience.

What You Desire by ROSA RENDL not only questions the representation amid a media-saturated society but also the traps involved in inquiring into identity and its constructions.

→ What You Desire is on view at 21er RAUM, 21er HAUS, Vienna until June 7, 2015.

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