Herwig Turk, Space for Rivers

Opening: Fri 12.05.2023, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibition: Thursday to Saturday, 3 – 7 pm

As part of FLUX – River interventions and explorations, Lungomare has invited the Austrian artist Herwig Turk to artistically explore the river landscapes of Bolzano.
Since spring 2022 Herwig Turk has been researching and documenting the surroundings photographically and cinematically, conducting conversations with scientists and historians and thus documenting the river landscape as a complex system that is in constant flux. The exhibition Space for Rivers brings together the results of his transdisciplinary work in a unique exhibition space: the former hydroelectric power station Rendlstain, which has been an important point of interaction between man and the river in Bolzano since the 19th century.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public program consisting of exhibition tours with the artist as well as three river walks with experts, which invite to take new perspectives on the river landscapes and to get to the bottom of their complex interrelations.

Public Program

Fri 12.05.2023
6–9 pm: Opening

Sat 13.05.2023
3 pm: Guided tour with the artist Herwig Turk
5 pm: River Exploration I: re-thinking the city, with Waltraud Kofler-Engl (art historian, Unibz), David Hofmann (Neuroscientist and climate activist)

Wed 17.05.2023
7 pm: at Lungomare, via Rafenstein 12, Bolzano
Presentation: FLUX-Zine | A newspaper concerned about actions, explorations and interconnections between rivers, animals, plants, people and the built environment, with Annalisa Metta (author and landscape architect), Hannes Obermair (historian), Alberto Winterle (architect)

Thu 25.05.2023
6 pm: Guided tour with the artist Herwig Turk
6.30 pm: River Exploration II: Metabolic disorder between city and river, with Peter Hecher (biologist, Civil Protection Agency), Roberta Bottarin (ecologist, Vice-Director Eurac Research)

Fri 26.05.2023
6 pm: River Exploration III: inhabiting the river, with Ermira Kola (Alexander Langer Stiftung), Diana Seyffarth (Volontarius)

Rivers are vital, changing and dynamic networks that reflect our patterns of society and economy. Although rivers have shaped landscapes for millennia and provided the basis for human and other than human survival, industrialisation in the western world has set in motion a counter-dynamic in which people shape and domesticate rivers by means of technology. (…) In my photographs and videos I try to identify patterns that indicate changes and inter-connections between human activity and rivers: traces in the landscape, water movements, variation in banks and flows. Sketches of hydraulic engineering projects, maps and elevation models encounter stones and gravel that imitate river patterns. The explanatory and evocative voices of scientists and engineers repeat and mingle with the images, creating perspectives of and approaches to river improvement. However, my art neither offers an idyll nor a simple solution to complex problems.

Herwig Turk in conversation with the project curators.