HALLOW HOLLOW
Kunstraum Lakeside
Opening, October 3, 2023, 7 pm
Exhibition, October 4 – November 10, 2023

"Two words that almost sound the same but have a single different vowel: Hallow Hollow reads the title of the exhibition by Stephanie Misa in Kunstraum Lakeside. The verb “hallow”—to venerate, honor as sacred, or to sanctify—is juxtaposed with “hollow”—empty, having a space or cavity inside—without any grammatical and sequential reference or an ostensible meaningful connection. The similarity of the words, however, invites us to ponder whatever might connect them. With the conjunction of two seemingly discrete units, the title alludes to a spatial contiguity that informs the entire exhibition: in the Kunstraum, Misa presents individual, stand-alone elements side-by-side, like in an encyclopedia, and leaves it up to the viewer to draw the connections between them.

Stephanie Misa looks back at the past in two ways: on the one hand, at the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021—the attack on the joint session of the United States Congress by supporters of Donald Trump, who was still acting president at the time but had already been voted out of office—and, on the other, at her own preoccupation with this event in an exhibition in Gallery Gundula Gruber in 2021. Combining previous works with new elements, the artist explores how the discourse on the Capitol attack has changed nearly three and a half years after the incident and her initial artistic engagement."

Hallow Hollow is also part of the yearly catalog of Kunstraum Lakeside Published by VFMK.

Photos by Johannes Puch