Monica Bonvicini at Belvedere 21

Since the mid-1990s Monica Bonvicini has been exploring political, social, and institutional situations and their impact on society, as well as on the conditions of artistic production. Her work is direct, merciless, political, and not without a dry sense of humor. In the process, she focuses on the relationship between architecture, gender roles, control mechanisms, and devices of power. Bonvicini has a multimedia approach, using drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and photography. For the Belvedere 21—originally the Austrian pavilion at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958—she has developed a site-specific and space-consuming installation that reacts radically to Karl Schwanzer’s architecture. As such, it reflects male-dominated power structures, which are expressed just as much in the constructed space as in art history, politics and language.