How to construct an image – Lunch Talk Sonja Abian

At her talk at the old saline in Hallein, unlike others before her, Sonja Abian picked only one work of hers to explain in great detail. It is the so-called angel apparatus, her contribution to an exhibition by artists Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. The project brings colonial religious paintings from Bolivia to Europe and puts them in exhibition, together with the reactions to them from contemporary artists. Sonja Abians work takes paintings of angels as its antetype.

But where in the original paintings lavish fabrics impress and archebuses link the angels to the mythology of the Indios, Sonja Abian cuts patterns out of newspaper reports of women abducted in Latin America, and maps showing the suspected locations of mass graves from the Franco era. She made a big effort to explain all the different layers and aspects put into this work of hers, saying finally that she was still working on the final explanatory layer of it. For those interested in seeing it for real now, it is on display as part of the exhibition “the Potosi Principle” who is currently housed in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and will move to the Haus der Kulturen in Berlin in September, opening there on the 7th of October.