The Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery is a mobile display presenting contemporary sculpture, installation and performance.

The gallery will show pieces by nine artists on top of a modified luggage rack on the roof of a Japanese compact car between August 13th and December 14th. Shown in different public locations in Vienna, the sculptures directly refer to the areas of the city where they are presented. Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery will drive around each area daily for one week.

"Under the pavement is the beach" is a slogan of the spontaneity-mad and institution-critical Situationists of the 60s. Today, a slogan could be: "I don't want art only in museums and on Instagram, I want it where every citizen can look! - Daihatsu! Up on the roofs of this city!"

At least on the roof of this car we will show sculptural works, performances and sound installations in the urban space of Vienna between mid August and December 2020. At the end of the respective one-week presentation drives, the Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery will be on the road with the artistic work on the roof, on an extended drive through Vienna's districts.

The Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery makes contemporary art visible to a broad audience beyond the hermetic art discourse and transfers artworks away from the podiums in exhibition spaces up to the roof of a small car, giving them a new mobility and temporality, which lets the city pass by as a changing context behind the shown works.

This is not about the new, but about the joyful continuation of an ideology of free and mobile "showing oneself" out there in the world.

1st Intervention: Prêt-à-porter by Titania Seidl & Lukas Thaler

In their collaborative sculpture created for Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery, the two artists fuse the idea of traditional panel painting with the monolithic form and surface quality of a rock. Organically enclosed within a monumental feigned boulder, Titania Seidl’s paintings seem like ambiguous ex-votos. They show fragments of bodies that concentrate out of painterly gestures.

The Plague Column on Vienna’s Graben offers a particular context for the presentation of Titania Seidl’s and Lukas Thaler’s piece, a baroque corporeality oscillating between lasciviousness and suffering. Their sculpture emphasizes the contemporary reinterpretation of the Plague Column by the citizens of Vienna: Sparked by the Corona pandemic, the column again became a site for appeals, hopes and for leaving offerings of votive images and objects.

The sudden re-actualisation of historical memorials, sites and symbols resulting from profound shifts in societal discourses is another important aspect. Provoked by the pandemic or the current vandalism of monuments related to colonialism motivated by the Black-Lives-Matter movement, the reappearance of public statues in the collective consciousness is a dynamic and fascinating phenomenon that needs to be questioned.

2nd Intervention: Popular by Ines Hochgerner

("I wish politicians would admit mistakes...")

The artist has an elongated sign with a blurred image of a reclining Ionic column - as a symbol for democratic processes - driving through Vienna at the Daihatsu Rooftop Gallery. The first stop is between the temporary parliament and the Volksgarten.

3rd Intervention: Das Geläut – die Marktschreier (The ringing - the market criers) by Reinhold Zisser

(Don't chase the merchants out of the temple. The temple comes to the merchants.)

As part of this cooperative project between the Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery and Reinhold Zisser's project of the "Notgalerie" (Emergency Gallery) in the Seestadt Aspern, the wooden bell tower will be transferred from the roof of the former "Notkirche" and today's "Notgalerie" to the roof of the Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery and driven in front of the main entrance of the Vienna-Contemporary Art Fair.

There, the car with the bell tower on the roof represents both gallery projects and refers to Zisser's project of the Notgalerie in the Seestadt.

In addition, in front of the entrance to Vienna Contemporary, art lovers will be offered parts of the Notgalerie to take away from the car. Zisser's Notgalerie is now in a new project stage: it will be dismantled successively by the end of September and the individual parts will be offered as gifts to as many people and institutions as possible in exchange for a certificate.

4th Intervention: Snickers Snitch II by Leon Höllhumer

Leon Höllhumer stages a performance with several performers in and around the Daihatsu-Rooftop-Gallery, using a variety of specially made sculptural "props" and objects.

The performance is also simultaneously a video shoot. This means that the audience of the performance also mutates into protagonists of the video, that scenes are not only performed once for the audience but are repeated several times for the camera.

The whole action thus oscillates between a performance for an "audience" and the setting of a film shoot.

5th Intervention: „Team Austria or I am from Österreich“ by Gabriele Edlbauer

"[...] Now when in Gabriele Edlbauer's sculptures strangely indeterminate, animal heads grow out of male-marked bodies and an idyllic bro scene is created, this brings together all three dimensions of zóomorphisation, or even more: the dimensions are put into a metonymic tension in which one is no longer sure who represents whom or what. Are the figures on the way to becoming human beings, or are people becoming animals? [...] Cute, interesting clowns are these guys; and because they are everything at once: Deeply scary, too familiar in the age of the creepy clown presidents. Their tameness makes the characters seem all the more threatening." Karin Harrasser, Political Zoology

For her project "Team Austria or I am from Österreich" (working title) at the Daihatsu Rooftop Gallery, Gabriele Edlbauer expands her loose series of sculptures of male marked bodies with animal "anteater" heads and hands by one more figure. A figure of a peeing skier corresponding to the series is screwed onto the roof of the Daihatsu and the gallery will thus be able to drive along selected boulevards of Vienna. Edlbauer wants to expand her discourse of ambivalence between cute hobby and toxic masculinity with a current political exaggeration. Laura Hatting will give a short lecture at the opening.

6th Intervention: She directs by Johanna Tinzl

Johanna Tinzl installs two loudspeakers on the roof of the Daihatsu. The loudspeakers reinforce instructions on how to use the public space in the quarter and are spoken by one or more female voices. The Daihatsu with the announcements curves through the quarter in a certain temporal choreography. When the Daihatsu is not curving, it will be parked at the corner of Reumannplatz and Wielandgasse.

7th Intervention: Social Distancing? Sure! But I am just a sculpture! Es geht hier nicht um Neurosen, ihr Mimosen! (This is not about neuroses, you sissies!) by Julia Haugeneder

With her sculpture, Julia Haugeneder creates an image of organic entanglement, which could evoke an impression of closeness but also physical tension. In her work the artist tries to deal with the current problems of social and physical encounters in an openly associative way. Encounters in public space are currently often associated with anxiety and nervousness and, as is well known, from a psychosomatic point of view, these can "hit the stomach" and, metaphorically speaking, "hit the gut". So the decision to park the DAIHATSU ROOFTOP GALLERY with this special sculpture on the roof in front of the Freud Museum seems to be an all too logical consequence. So that is where this vernissage will take place. The following week the gallery is on the road in and around the 9th district and spontaneously parks for 2 hours every day in a free parking lot.

8th Intervention: come and see (Reif für die Insel) by Helmut Heiss

Majestic, glorious and pompous, the seahorse glides through the streets of Vienna. The leader of a whole armada of offended swimming pool trash in search of trouble. She is made of metal, but of little stability. It bends and bends and swings all the time.
Come on! Come on! And go! Yes, yes, yes, yes! Buckle up, baby, or you'll unbuckle - the night is young and there's plenty of gas in the tank.

9th Intervention: Optimizer by Valentin Aigner

What if Franz Sacher had invented the 'original Wiener Ameisenhaufen' instead of the famous cake? What if Prince Metternich had just choked to death on a piece of this pastry in 1832? What if this masterpiece of patisserie had since become a doughy manifestation of political resistance? If this event was commemorated every year on December 12 and parades similar to a harvest festival were held? What if authoritarian politics, obsessed with power, no longer had a place in Austria? If these parades were led by a so-called Schirch-Percht, who did not rebuke disobedient children but had to atone for the parents' guilt? If ultraviolet light would protect against anthropocentrism, would it not remind the body so irradiated of a growing hole in the ozone layer and the causal connections that go with it? If a fetish object on the roof of a car would give the vehicle forces that would extend beyond merely slightly improved road holding? And finally, the question of whether surrealist strategies can still be of any use in times of infowars?