Sira-Zoé Schmid. The Concurrent Presence Part III XII

Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea is pleased to present "The Concurrent Presence Part III XII", a solo exhibition featuring works by the Austrian artist Sira-Zoé Schmid.
Sira-Zoé Schmid is an artist, with a focus on photography, text, installation and performance. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the class "Fine Art and Photography" under Matthias Herrmann and Martin Guttmann, and graduated in 2013. She is living and working in Vienna, and Salzburg.
She has received many grants and residencies and has been shown in several international institutions and galleries.
Working within the "extended field of photography" Sira-Zoé Schmid explores the different (multilayered) possibilities of multimedia pictorial invention. The examination of all media and sociocultural topics that surround us are very important to her and are conducive to her artistic work.
The vulcanic deserts of Gran Canaria and Lanzarote are the ever changing misanthropic enviroments of Sira-Zoé Schmids video performances exhibited here. The deserts of this planet are no stranger to the art world: a convenient metaphor for emptiness and desolation, it is the paradigmatic 'nowhere'.
Deserts are real places, and they are also metaphors. Real deserts have an ecological extreme that makes them easy to symbolize many aspects of human life: an empty place, a place without many resources, a place where lives are fragile and in the balance.
But the metaphor is not just about the negative. Deserts are also extraordinary places of resilience, surprises, and astonishing beauty.

Great artists of the twentieth century such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Martin, have chosen at different times in their lives to immerse themselves in the boundless territories of the American deserts.
Michael Heizer, leader of the Land Art movement in the sixties together with Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, created works of art and large-scale installations in the American deserts documented with photographs and films.
In 2017 Schmid began her video performance series "Desert Flower" in the American Mojave desert. A woman — the artist — wearing a dark dress and a small blue parasol and turning her back to the viewer, takes a solitary path into the desert until she disappears on the horizon. With a clear and poetic visual language she explores the interaction of light and shadow on the shapes of the desert, revealing its austere beauty and reflecting as she slowly advances through the desert on the sense of bewilderment and fragility that this beauty causes.
On Artist in Residency in Lanzarote & Gran Canaria in 2022 Schmid continued her performance series Desert Flower by a second part.

This is what the curator Sophie Haslinger writes about her work : "A woman — the artist — enters the frame from the right, her back facing the camera. The protagonist, wearing a black dress and holding an electric-blue parasol, looks almost surreal in this barren landscape. She continues walking towards the horizon until her parasol becomes a small blue dot that slips entirely out of view as it disappears into the distance.
During a month long project trip through Gran Canaria and Lanzarote Sira-Zoé Schmid was finally able to continue the group of works „Desert Flower Part I" from 2017 (Mojave Desert, California) by a second part containing 11 new video performances and photographic works.
Like all of Sira-Zoé Schmid's photo and video performances, „Desert Flower" is — as the artist describes — a "private performance" for the camera only, without the presence of an audience. Schmid also repeatedly works with fixed camera positions that enable her to act as both performer, director, and camera operator. The moving picture thus all the more replicates photography: each individual frame could exist on its own as tightly composed photographic works. She worked with visual artist Markus Oberndorfer to photographically document the performances.
This video-performances tie into Sira-Zoé Schmid's early performative works, which always grew out of personal experiences. Only rough concepts at first, she develops her performances intuitively and spontaneously, referencing her concrete surroundings. The protagonist walks calmly but determinedly on a path towards the horizon until she is no longer visible. The action of walking visualizes both ephemerality and the passing of pain and loss. At the same time, Schmid stages the walk as a meditative process — in the vastness of the landscape she reflects on the eternity of thoughts.
The title "Desert Flower" signalizes the possibility of life and beauty within an inhospitable environment. Like a desert flower, the protagonist appears and disappears again shortly thereafter. What remains is a memory. Only seen from the back, Schmid's character deliberately remains anonymous, and can be representative of anyone. With a clear and poetic visual language, Desert Flower is a universal exploration into loss and ephemerality and the various mechanisms of coping with these sensations".

The exhibition is supported by Land Salzburg, Forum Austriaco di Cultura Roma, Bildrecht & Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea.