Artist: Stine Ølgod
Exhibition title: Scopaesthesia
Venue: Pilot, Vienna, Austria
Date: June 27 – July 21 2024
Photography: Flavio Palasciano / all images courtesy of the artists and Pilot
kindly supported by BMKOES,
Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport, Österreich
Exhibition text:
Walk into a room where you have 3 doors around you – Walk straight ahead and find a key — Alert!
Turn, and walk around it. See its points and from there, look above, the room is watching you — If
it was night time. You would have fallen into a trap in the middle of the room. Is there anyone there
or is there a wall. That doesn‘t see at all.
(If I had a key and I turned it back around in the middle of my palm 3 times clockwise it would
become 100 times its size and crystallise, stealing away the substance from the bathroom. Then it
would place itself in the middle of the room and tell me stories of when it was a fighter.)
The room is old, very old, it stares and stares and out the two windows you are stared back at from
across the street. It stares and stares and finds its own perpendicular mirror. Underneath one of
these viewing points sits a lower composition of image, collage on mirror printing, this one is built
into the place. This one doesn‘t move just as the one on the other wall, slopped into a smashing of
architectural transformation, this one is a slit into the other sense. With its steel it holds the history
of painted sceneries where you could poke your hand through into another space and be met with
a shared reality.
Look at the window through the wall. Now turn back around. Scopaesthesia, the terminology of this
space. The Psychic Staring Effect. A primal reflex or a cognitive power, a space in which the magic
is given a terminology. Witness is here. The term in bold is used to imagine invisible things, as the
people through the walls do, watching you. As the public on the transport, the mass expectations,
the existing in the present where you are constantly re-doing what can be done, unless you are
doing as you were told it should be done.
The more you do the un-doing, the reflection may be more present.
The looking at you, the seen self, in this room, time and time again
Do you see the room?
Text by Natalie Hamrlik
Stine Ølgod, born 1989 in Copenhagen, lives and works in Vienna. She holds a MFA in Sculpture
from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (AT). In her recent works she explores notions of privacy,
exhibitionism and voyeurism. By lending the sculptural and wall based pieces eyes and reflective
properties she flips the relationships between the observer and the observed.
PILOT is a project space founded in 2017 by three room-mates and artists, who decided to use
their grand Durchgangszimmer (a connecting room) as an exhibition space. PILOT has been run in
different constellations with a wide variety of artistic projects having been realised at regular
intervals, with Niclas Schöler currently in charge of the programming. PILOT is a platform for a
wide spectrum of different artistic positions, with a special curatorial focus on feminist and queer
positions.