About the exhibition:

Edgar Honetschläger

E LA NAVE VA

1 September – 31 October 2023, 9 am – 6 pm

Opening: 31 August, 11 am, as part of the Days of Transformation

Closing event: 11 November, 11 am – 3 pm – register at info@globart.at

Melk Abbey, abbey park and pavilion

“We no longer have to fear that the sky will fall on our heads; the fear of the apocalypse is a different one today.”
Edgar Honetschläger

Edgar Honetschläger counters the colonial fantasies in Johann Wenzel Bergl's frescoes from 1763–65 with an image: a withered wild herb drifts in a paper boat across a sea of down … like a cloud.

This summer, visual artist and filmmaker Edgar Honetschläger devotes an installation to the pavilion of Melk Abbey. The exhibition's title is borrowed from Federico Fellini's film E LA NAVE VA: And the Ship Sails On. Only there are no people on board, but a dead ferula (giant fennel), which became the staff of the Pontifex Maximus – and is it arriving in the boat from a New World? One that, once like the Garden of Eden, fell victim to colonisation. Columbus said: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse.”

The image created amid the baroque splendour is complemented in the pavilion's main room by an oversized egg painted with insects, which draws on the Etruscan understanding of nature yet reflects modernity: bees buzz busily towards its gilded tip. Invisibly present in the room is the NGO gobugsgo.org, founded by Honetschläger in 2018, which equates culture with nature and collectively creates non-human zones protected from human destruction. Hope – because only together will we bring about the turnaround. It takes ALL OF US. Utopias can be realised; dystopias are passive.

He thinks it is great that environmental issues are currently one of the main themes in visual art. Yet for the artist, merely pointing out and criticising is not enough. “Art has a duty to go beyond that and do something concrete for nature.” Art that deals with the topic in terms of content is not enough. You often hear sentences like this from him: climate protest is good, but not enough. Separating waste is important, but not enough. We have long been at a tipping point. Der Standard, 30 August 2023

Admission to the exhibition is included in the ticket for the abbey park. Tickets for the abbey park are available at the park entrance or at the Melk Abbey ticket office (adults €4.50, pupils/students €3.50, children €1.00). For participants of the Days of Transformation, admission is free from 31 August to 2 September 2023.

Photos © Luiza Puiu