Marko Lulic, Hard and Soft No.2, 2002/05, fiberplate, wood, varnish, 450 x 650cm.

"Living and Working in Vienna," curated by Trevor Smith from the New Museum of Contemporary Art, features artists who inhabit and produce work in the Austrian capital. Almost all of the 10 artists that Smith selected for the exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, also appear in the Vienna version, Living and Working in Vienna II, at the KUNSTHALLE wien, curated by Lucas Gehrman, which includes twenty-three artists

Entering the hallway of the Austrian Cultural Forum, I was immediately enticed by the video work constructed normality: promesse du bonheur by ____fabrics interseason. Towards the end of the piece these words appear: "The onset of the revolution will be erroneously received as an advertising campaign." By depicting shots before the Paris fashion shows, the artists attempt to be subversive in their own way. Wally Salner & Johannes Schweiger, the names behind ____fabrics interseason, describe this work as a vehicle that deals with concepts of "New Poverty" and the welfare state.

The queues outside before the shows began were used to create a fictitious political demonstration. Salner and Schweiger explained on their website: "Both the audience and the public turned from waiting fashion-groupies to attendants of an imaginative manifestation, and became therefore a part of the advertising campaign/show of ____fabrics interseason."

One wonders though how such an intervention aids the average citizen’s with concerns of welfare when couture shows, in most cases, are created for a clientele that belongs to the upper echelons of society?

Once in the lobby of the Austrian Cultural Foundation, the viewer confronts a large, intimidating drawing by Klaus Pobitzer, Parade. Militant women garbed in Cold War-era green uniforms are parading in what resembles the Belvedere in Vienna or a similar baroque structure. The ladies in uniforms are surrounded by equally dominating women, who are saluting in the nude. The scale of the human body mixed with Pobitzer’s illustrative virtuosity makes this one of the show’s outstanding pieces.

By navigating the austere interior, which is covered in brushed aluminum, stainless steel detailing, and painted metal cladding, one encounters Sabina Hortner’s drawings Twins 01 and Twins 02. They are placed in such a way that they echo each other on different floors of the edifice. The colored abstractions executed with marker pens on cardboard are rendered through pure and simple lines, paying homage to the history of color theory. Situated practically on top of each other, they perfectly reflect the verticality of the building’s design and fit perfectly in a rather difficult exhibition space.

Richard Hoeck and John Miller’s video Something for Everyone starts at the Praterstern, Vienna’s 2^nd District, with the billboard advertising campaigns for Coca-Cola and Ballentine’s. The day of a UPS delivery employee Ken is packed in 29 minutes of filmic time. Hoeck and Miller capture Ken’s journey from apartment to apartment, the scenes always filled with a strange soft-porn atmosphere as our UPS hero becomes a fantasy object of both men and women. Throughout the video the main character gets identified just as another brand name, much the same way as the video starts out with the logos of Coca Cola or Ballentine.

David Moises’s sculpture Wobbles was cleverly placed in front of Josh Muller’s video Algen, a new work that appropriates a fragment from Tarkovski’s Solaris. The aquatic filled sculpture is–a seating device of sorts–is a pneumatic apparatus that reacts to differences in pressure produced when people are seated.

Carola Derting’s video Strangers on first glance has a very humorous tone. Derting descends an escalator in a train station, passing through the lobby and leaving a stretched red stocking behind her. Derting describes her work as slapstick, but the content she deals with has much more weight when it resonates with the issue of illegal immigration. To this day people don’t how to deal with the Other, the stranger. Perhaps, as Julia Kristeva puts it, the stranger is really ourself.

The last stop on the tour Marko Lulic’s Hart und weich Nr. 2 (hard and soft), a representation of an organic swimming pool architecture that was part of the Hotel Haludovo Complex, built in 1971 in Croatia, and co-financed by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse. The installation is accompanied with a film by Dejan Karaklajic and Jovan Acim documenting the opening of the complex. Lulic habitually explores moments from post war Yugoslavia by recreating them in the gallery space via architecture, sculpture or video, exploring the effects of re-representing. But what does it mean for the artists do rebuild memories from the year that he was born? Lulic says: "My relationship with Yugoslavia is not a nostalgic search for roots, but an exploration of how Modernism manifested itself in this part of the world."

The choice of the 16 mm film that accompanies the installation, We Don’t Sell Hollywood, marks Lulic’s interest in body politics. The documentary features the opening of the Haludovo Hotel, capturing Guccione’ introductory speech, surrounded by scantily clad models. He introduces his girls as the new "peace corpse" of the Cold War and declares that the hotel is not going to sell Hollywood but Yugoslavia.

In the Vienna exhibition, Lulic shows the video WR: Mysteries of Disco, a collage of empty discothèques juxtaposed by a remake from a scene from WR: Mysteries of the Organism by the Serbian director Dusan Makavejev. The original movie starts with the theories of the psychoanalyst Wilheim Reich and develops into a political satire, proclaiming erotic and sexual liberation as the only affective means against repressive power structures. In Lulic’s version a woman, Edita Malovcic, dressed in military-style clothing shouts an aggressive monologue on the terrace of a high-rise building in Vienna. Even those who do not understand Serbo-Croat can comprehend that the speech is highly political, involving terms such as communism, fascism, revolution, and sexuality. The protagonist declares: "Only by liberating both love and labor can we create a self-regulating worker’s society."