Going Continental: group exhibition in Vienna.

‘Going Continental’ was a group exhibition project curated by GIFT, who are visual artists Gudrun Bielz and Kim Merrington. GIFT is predicated on the principle of a three way transaction of giving, receiving and reciprocation and operates in the space between institutions, specialisms and people, in this instance between researchers at Wimbledon and those of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

For this project, Christine Hatt made two series of text works that were exhibited discretely in a single architectural space, each in a ‘cloud array’. The first series, ‘Childs Play’, connected to a child’s learning of English, and the second, ‘Theoretical Gardening’, related to plant classification (taking on, in Austria, a particular resonance with botanists such as Mendel). The arrays alluded to scientific taxonomy, as well as to amateurism, obsession and absurdity (‘theoretical’ rather than actual gardening).

Christine Hatt records, codes and abbreviates the minutiae of everyday existence: phone numbers, names, times, addresses and dates. The resulting data is then edited and re-notated to form a wall-text. Within and between texts, sub-categories are created within an invented taxonomy. This work examined how visual texts, comprising complete categories from the artist’s database, could be presented as a non-linear display to function as visual and taxonomic array, and constituted a constructed history.