Mathias Poledna, "My Favorite Shop," 2024

Pointing to the disparate reference image on the poster for his 2015 exhibition in Chicago, Mathias Poledna revealed his Viennese upbringing as he slipped into a quiet Freudian disposition. “It’s an opportunity to be confused and it’s an opportunity to say, ‘Well what does this have to do with anything?’” He continued, alluding to the entirety of his practice, “But of course, as we know, everything has to do with everything.” [1]

Bearing that sentiment in mind ten years later, Poledna’s rhetorical question and maximalist response reverberate under a further ambiguous guise. The artist’s first institutional solo show in a decade opened this past October at the Halle für Kunst Steiermark in Graz, with another referential invitation image aimed to disorient. The 12th-century limestone sculpture Head of King David was once part of a cadre of ancient kings decorating the facade of Notre Dame. Today, it is one of the few remaining pieces that survived the French Revolution’s campaign to sever the heads of the monarchy and their depictions. The stone carving, now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, is largely deteriorated, as if it has fallen face-first on the hard ground that leveled the central plane of the profile; the hollows of the eyes – once filled with lead – are deeply inset and ominous. But it is the photograph, rather than the object, that initiates the Poledna exhibition as a litany of binaries: shifting political powers in past and present, institutional display and degradation, interpretative authority and oppression – each register possessing something captivating but still unresolved.

The crux of the exhibition was the nearly 10-minute film My Favorite Shop (2024), which was screened in a loop on the right side of a monumental freestanding wall that partitioned the main exhibition space. The 35mm projector cast light from a separate room through a cutout in the wall. Working in tandem with automated lights, the darkened space and rhythmic beat signaled the film’s beginning. The atmosphere aligned with the subject matter on the surface, as the audience prepared to sit and watch the anticipated performance: from a black void, a fashion show begins, featuring two barefoot runway models in belted tunics of loose silk, and the heavy beat of a remixed arrangement. Six minutes into the film, one model returns several times clad in red, clutching the long reddish-brown hair of a severed male head – the singular accessory of the show. Eyes closed, pale, and with chiseled cheekbones and a full beard, the head is not a gruesome display, but an exceptionally uncanny and lifelike Hollywood studio prop. The scene cuts to its final black frame as the projection proceeds until the sound fades out.

“Mathias Poledna,” Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, 2024

The camera’s perspective is predominantly assumed as if from the front row, with an alternating sharp then listless eye for inspection and detail. There are recurring tracking and close-up shots of the models’ bodies that highlight the drapery of the sheer fabric and the angular figures’ hips, backsides, nipples, or thighs beneath. At times, the lingering camera feels invasive and perverse. The tunics, naturally, lend an air of ancientness and androgyny. But the fashion metaphor, despite the film’s title and runway production, appears more like a vehicle for the point, rather than the point itself. The loop of the same outfit comes in a range of hues – black, violet, green, red, but the most predominant being white – aligning with the color codes of Christian liturgy underlying the mood of an event or season. All the signifiers of time are sped up as indicated by a progression of sound, repetition, and the nuance of shifting colors. The entry of the severed head, held by the model wearing the red tunic for the first time, is an unmistakable metaphor for the crimson vestment that denotes Feasts of the Martyrs and for the Passion of John the Baptist. The bearded male head reads as a symbolic stand-in for a dead saint or sinner at the hands of an unfazed model. Thus, what appears as a fashion show is something more akin to a religious procession, marching orders, or parade of defiance.

The quick and repetitive bass lines and beats-per-minute are the perfect pace for the models’ gait, with their notable nonchalant or thousand-yard stare backdropped by a remix of the soft psychedelic rock song “The Winter Is Cold” (1969) by the obscure sister-duo Wendy and Bonnie. The lyrics reverberate throughout – “The winter is cold (is cold) / The winter is cold on you and cold on me / Since you’ve been gone / The winter is cold” – but at times between beat switches and the spliced staccato or stalling of the words, the audio begins to resemble a stutter or an inability to speak. There is a tension to the sparse language within My Favorite Shop – a triad of pronouns throughout, like the title’s “my” or the repetitive crooning of “you” and “me” in the lyrics – which beckons the question, Who is Who? As the sound design intensifies and is overlayed or interspersed with “Clapping Music” (1972) by Steve Reich, the nonverbal overtakes the tenor of the film to become a soundtrack that could be either a feigned audience’s applause or an inaudible guttural reaction to the aftermath of a beheading. It is that precise yet enigmatic ethos of the artist that leaves me wanting more when I know I should want to avoid it altogether.

“Mathias Poledna,” Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, 2024

Gender and its power dynamics stand at the forefront. As the film cuts back and forth to black with an occasional soft focus or slight blur, I’m reminded of a death scene from the eyes of the dying protagonist shifting in and out of consciousness and attempting to say his last words. The thinly veiled notion of victor and loser – or at least murderer and victim – and again, the ambiguity of it all, vexes me to no end. But of course, “Everything has to do with everything.” The only telltale signs Poledna gives us in his rendition are to Salome and Judith, both of whom serve as biblical figures, classic art history subjects, reinterpreted modernist narratives of seduction and decapitation, and rare images of female aggression. Salome acts as the villainous temptress, who demands John the Baptist’s head and has it served on a platter for speculative reasons including obsession, retribution, or the appeasement of her mother. Judith, conversely, is a clear tale of perseverance and feminine wiles; she acts courageously to save her city and beheads Holofernes herself, despite the gruesomeness and violence of the task. Both women – so symbolic in their rage and the presumed shock at their capacities – are often confused for or compounded with one another: a reality that is unhelped by the fact that both deal with the depicted deaths of bearded, long-haired, red-headed, fair-skinned men.

In his film work, Poledna has looked at the role of the object and its lifelessness before. A Rolex watch in Substance (2014) or the glassware of Adolf Loos in Double Old Fashion (2009), for instance, exist as status-driven things against the black void within a grammar of commercial display. They are material and masculine-coded goods one can only prescribe meaning or value to by having taken meaning or value away from something else. For My Favorite Shop, a man’s severed head becomes the film’s final image that destabilizes the patriarchal notion of male power and advantageous position through lenses of gender and labor. Invariably, the words here – designer, maker, and producer – are all mere synonyms for god, but also for artist, who creates in arrogant favor as a virtuous chosen vessel. The model – by virtue of her position as a service worker to the distant, unseen designer – holds the object at the aesthetic behest of her boss, while she is by extension another part of the continuous cycle of commercialization and objectification.

“Mathias Poledna,” Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, 2024

Elsewhere, two rooms remained lit while the film was screened: the apse-shaped gallery on the ground floor, which displayed a hanging hand-knotted rug, and the basement gallery, which featured 17 photographic archival prints, mostly black-and-white, and a readymade Michelin tire. These previously exhibited prints and the tire, Untitled (circa 1963–72) and Untitled (2022) respectively, align around the notion of varying stages of fabrication and automotive production, highlighting an era of postwar manufacturing and industrialization that seems unsentimental in its archival origin but desirable by the act of commemoration as contemporary art. While the wall label points to 21 prints as part of an original suite of works, the gesture of withholding 4 seems to be the subtext in this display, alluding to a longing and nostalgia in object-making.

Conversely, the work upstairs, a modernist hand-knotted rug, Örtagården (Spring garden) – designed in 1928 by the late Swedish textile artist Märta Måås-Fjetterström – is presented as a production from 1988 by the weavers Birgit Svensson and Birgith Nilsson in the Måås-Fjetterström workshop after her death. Like the tire in its original wrapping, the rug is placed by Poledna in a Duchampian gesture that parlays a parallel tension between the film’s dramaturgy and resounding audio and the carpet’s quiet restraint as reflected by the chapel-like architecture of the room. The direct implication for a more authentic process or production is there, allowing the rug to be hung as if at an altar, along with Poledna’s name omitted from the object’s making but, by virtue of display, not entirely absent from its attribution. Questions of women’s labor and authorship immediately come to mind as they’re impossible to miss, but a further meditation on the applied art object and private ownership feels more weighted and warranted, only this time within the institutional white walls rather than the cinema’s black void.

Märta Måås-Fjetterström, “Örtagården,” 1928 (reproduction from 1988)

Amidst the expert sound, images, and objects, the exhibition implies so many underlying and volleying references that the surface becomes mired with a political reticence that borders on neutrality or nonchalance, particularly toward gender. An attitude that can only be afforded by an ambiguity that is allowed to play both sides of the argument. The direct overtures of female protagonists – the singers who are the primary focus of the sound, the models who walk in repetition on a loop in more ways than one, and the weavers who fabricate a dead woman’s design – feel instrumentalized, postured by the artist to convey connotations of revolution or empowerment. But a slip of such a deft hand and the artist’s aims at ambiguity stand against a harsh contemporary moment that continues to see the loss of woman’s agency, a fact that is much too heartbreaking to overlook.

“Mathias Poledna,” Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, September 21–November 22, 2024.

Brit Barton is an artist and writer based in Zurich and Chicago.

Image credit: 1. + 2. + 3. + 4. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz; 5. © Märta Måås-Fjetterström Archives / private collection; photos kunst-dokumentation.com