Mathias Poledna: Imitation of Life

Mathias Poledna (b. Vienna, 1965; lives and works in Los Angeles) is developing a new project for the Austrian pavilion at the 55. Biennale di Venezia in 2013. The publication presents and contextualizes this year's contribution to the world's preeminent international art exhibition. Mathias Poledna's oeuvre examines interconnections between art and entertainment culture, modernism in architecture and design, the language of the cinema, and the history of exhibition-making. His works are distinguished by a rigorous critical engagement with the medium of film and the function of images in the present and past. They have usually taken the form of highly focused film installations incorporating a wealth of references to twentieth-century culture. Poledna's new project explores the same dynamic field, tracing his artistic process, which is defined by continuities as well as deliberate and targeted discontinuities. Designed by the artist in collaboration with Martha Stutteregger, the publication contains contributions by the curator and commissioner of the Austrian pavilion, Jasper Sharp; the cultural scholar Diedrich Diederichsen; and the professor of political aesthetics Esther Leslie.