Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Salzburg 2024
 

In Daniela Zeilinger's working method, media and material-reflective processes intertwine to create images that always raise the question of the conditions of their own mode of representation. Experimental work processes and a variety of media transformations are central to her work. Using collage and montage techniques that interweave analogue material and digital images, she creates pictures that reveal themselves as complex layers questioning the preconditions of photographic and painted representation. At thresholds between analog and digital photography as well as painting and drawing, the artist refers in the exhibition „Polkadots" to the simple dot as a starting motif and the highest concentration of formal expression.
- Niklas Koschel

FRISE Künstler:innenhaus, Hamburg 2024

Laurel Chokoago, Elisa Goldammer, Maik Gräf, Almut Hilf, Maximilian Koppernock, Mitko Mitkov, Caspar Sänger, Jenny Schäfer, Wiebke Schwarzhans, Dirk Stewen, Daniela Zeilinger, with a text by Mira Anneli Naß.
 

Working with or in photography is always caught between the idea of technical perfection and the desperate escape from the line of vision, the square, the material. The destructive characteristics of the history of photography, such as in the colonial era, are not only of a substantive or formal nature but also, as we can also categorise thanks to the exhibition "Mining Photography" (MK&G Hamburg), of an ecological nature. The exhibition "FOTOGRAFIE ZERSTÖREN" will showcase artists who deal with the deconstruction of technical processes and the abstraction of photographic material, but also with new perspectives on the object, the image and the position.
- Mira Anneli Naß

Sizematters. Raum für Kunst & Film, Vienna 2023

"Uncertainity" is the title of the joint exhibition by Kathrin Ganser and Daniela Zeilinger, in which they open a critical dialogue on the supposed certainties and blurred edges of photography. In their complex and multi-layered works, which are essentially characterised by the use of different visual media and media-reflexive strategies, they put familiar modes of perception to the test. (...) As their artistic practice is characterised by triggering more questions than providing answers on the part of the viewer, Kathrin Ganser and Daniela Zeilinger focus on what one could call the indeterminate in photography.
- Dr. Christina Natlacen

Salon Elektrohalle Rhomberg, Salzburg 2022

In Daniela Zeilinger's photographic experiments, a wide variety of light-dependent techniques merge into hybrid constellations that tell of the existence of multiple realities. The image sparks an investigative gaze in terms of indexicality; an attempt to separate the different levels from one another and to trace them back to actualities. But the image does not disintegrate. Instead, it references the numerous agents and ancillary techniques involved in its creation: the artist's body, the display of a laptop, colorful pigments, the staff of the photo studio, and so on. Some of the elements have been translated from positive to negative and vice versa, therefore implementing several contradictory realities that coexist in a singular image space. Their relations generate a choreography of different materialities and temporalities that refer to the individual durations of the various exposure and editing processes. Like the layers of geological formations, from which we can read the age of rocks, the earth, and time itself, we try to look down into the ground of the photographic works and, loosely following Heinz von Foerster, ask ourselves: where is the one reality? Where are the many realities?
- Sophie Publig

school, Vienna 2022
 

Tombola is an exhibition format initiated by Terese Kasalicky and Heti Prack. Teams of artists are invited to throw their themes and media into the lottery pot, the raffle tickets are drawn. The conditions for the works are determined by Fortuna and the results are exhibited.
 

Janine Schranz & Daniela Zeilinger
Soft vanishing points
 

Tombola: Metamorphosis & Imprint
 

...windows have always been gateways for our imagination.
We look outwards, then turn inwards to dream. ...be that
from the inside of a remote cabin, within the confines of
a high-rise, or the interior of a railway carriage.
Time by windows is time well spent.
(Hartley Martin. „Foreword.“ Sidetracked 18, June 2020)

Mz*Baltazar’s Laboratory, Vienna 2022

The exhibition "Blend Together" by Janine Schranz and Daniela Zeilinger, presented at Mz*Baltazar’s Laboratory as part of this year's Foto Wien, follows on thematically from the joint exhibition "Passepartout," on view at hoast in Vienna in 2021. Whereas last year's attention was focused on processes of selecting, cropping and fading out, this time the focus is on situations of transparency and blending. While at hoast the focus was on techniques of inclusion and exclusion within a given architecture or within the image field, the exhibition at Mz*Baltazar’s will examine possibilities of communication between inside and outside, from artwork to artwork, and between real space and image space.
- Michael Wonnerth-Magnusson

Salzburger Kunstverein, 2021

In her exhibition Yonder, the artist raises poignant questions about photography's relation to reality. Her works, as analogue photographs, are created in a multi-layered process of transformation and translation. They oscillate between image and imagination, and photography and painting. An enigmatic narrative connects the individual pictorial spaces and evokes a place where one can never really be: yonder.

Elektrohalle Rhomberg, 2021

The title of the exhibition refers to the surrealist play "Les mamelles de Tirésias" by Guillaume Apollinaire from 1903 with the subtitle "Drame surréaliste". With this subtitle and in the foreword to the play, the poet invented the word "surrealism" to describe his new style of drama. In 1924 Breton took over the term as the name for the already existing intellectual movement in literature, art and film.
The piece was set to music by Francis Poulenc for Opera Buffa in 1944. The exhibiting artists freely associate with the exhibition title.

hoast, Wien 2021

Cropping and framing – the selection of visual information into a framed fragment – are among the main tools of photography and film. In the works of Janine Schranz and Daniela Zeilinger, these techniques of framing, so inherent in the dispositifs of film and photography, are transposed to different media, turned on and against themselves, inverted and deconstructed. As an emblem for the multifaceted framing effects they develop in their joint exhibition in hoast, the two artists have chosen a concept closely linked to the history of presentation of the (photographic) images: the passe-partout. (Michael Wonnerth-Magnusson)

Rectangle ties in with the series Screenshot, and focuses in particular on the relationship between abstraction and photography. Here, abstraction is primarily examined for the aspect that John Hilliard has formulated in "Using Photography to exorcise Ghosts” and about which Emma Lewis writes in the "Shape of Light" catalog: "[...] by using strategies of abstraction, the photographer is able to stimulate in the viewer something that also happens when one looks at a drawing or painting [...]: a consciousness of the materials that are used and how the work is made. In other words, abstraction can help us to look not at an image on the photographic surface, but at the whole object itself.”

The series Screenshot proposes a dialogue between photography and painting. The large size of the photographs creates a direct relation to the viewer and refers to their reference frame of painting.
The images are created in a multilayered process from transformation and translation, using different media like painting, drawing, Cut-Out, collage, a screen and re-photographed material within the working process. The different media are like "collaborators", shaping the workflow with their specific quality, analogous to dancers, who interpret the score of a choreography. Deviations and errors in the translation, become a constructive part of the composition, e.g., moiree effect.

The series am / pm was created during a residency in Paliano / Italy. A piece of paper, a pencil, a piece of cable, time of day, light and shadow, coincidence and drawing are the defining parameters of the composition. A cable falls on a sheet of paper at different times of the day. The resulting shape and its shadow are captured by pins.

In the series The Very, the photographic moment, the punctum, is crucial. Pictures from dance magazines serve as a starting point for a painterly revision. As long as the paint is wet, parts of the paper remain transparent. The result is a picture that is only visible for a short time. The photograph resembles this picture, defying its ephemeral state.

In the series Noli, found footage from dance magazines, snapshots of a choreography, gets alienated and re-photographed. The photographic moment is decisive: The two layers touching create an ephemeral image, which is photographically captured.

Invariant Variation examines the idea of variation based on a specific object: a knot. The title refers to the fact that, to some extent, variations change the appearance but not the underlying quality of an object. Mathematically, a knot is the embedding of a circle in three-dimensional space, including its continuous deformation. Each knot can be represented in different ways, no diagram is unique. The knot theory therefore deals with descriptions representing the same knot. Knot invariants are used in mathematics to distinguish knots.
In the series Invariant Variation, knots are viewed from different perspectives and reduced to their drawing. Points become lines, their shadows allude to a spatiality.

trio a continues the series reformulation both formally and in terms of content. In trio a #2, for example, colored plastic strings as three-dimensional lines define a space that becomes a picturesque-looking surface in photography. In their materiality and colourfulness, they contrast the background.

With the reformulation of material, a method of choreographic processes is transferred to the work with photography in order to reinterpret found footage from photographic documentations of dance performances.
In reformulation #2 the gaze of dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer points into a distant, imaginary place and thus expands the photographic surface into space. reformulation #3 is the collage of a photograph from 1908 with a private photograph. The stripes relate to the might materiality of the costume of the dancer Grete Wiesenthal and transform the pictured photography into an object.