Rainer Ganahl

Born in 1967 - Bludenz, Austria. Lives and works in New York, USA

 

“Bicycling…”, video series, 2004-2006.
(including special project “Bicycling Bucharest”)
Venues: Museum of Geology

 

The bicycle is not only my unique vehicle of transportation but also my urban eyeglass - some extension of my visual and acoustic organs. As such it is a real social urban interface. When working with my dreams over an 8 months period I realized with surprise that I was dreaming constantly of my bicycle in relationship to the apprehension of my world. I'm a bicycle rider since early childhood. My first birthday present I remember was a bicycle. I have never stayed in a place for long without a bicycle, including in Tokyo where I was harassed daily by the police for riding a bicycle. (I was considered a bicycle thief).
I bicycle against the traffic while filming without holding the steering wheel. I drive around the city filming directly across the steering wheel thus rendering it into cross hairs. This brings me through a variety of different neighbourhoods and places that give a cityscape quite surprising to see. This risky and unlawful engagement with the bicycle, the city and my camera creates an anti-gravitational epic of traffic jams and busy people.
The bicycle is really - next to the computer and the radio - my most important instrument for 'making it through my life'.  (Rainer Ganahl)

Recent exhibitions
The Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University Museum, New York ; Museum of Modern Art, MUMOK, Vienna; Baumgartner Gallery, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Momenta Art, New York; Kunstverrein Frankfurt, and Venice Biennial.A

Selection of Recent Publications
William Kaizen, "Please, teach me..." Rainer Ganahl and the Politics of Learning, Wallach Art Gallery , Columbia University, New York 2005
Rainer Ganahl (ed.), MONEY AND DREAMS: COUNTING THE LAST DAYS OF THE SIGMUND FREUD BANKNOTE, Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, New York, 2005
Rainer Ganahl, Road to War, MUMOK (Museum of Modern Art Vienna), and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2005
Rainer Ganahl, NEXT TARGET - Versteinerte Politik / Petrified Politics, GAK (Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen), and Revolver, Frankfurt, 2004
Rainer Ganahl, Please, write your opinons of U.S. politics..., onestarpress, Paris, 2003
Rainer Ganahl, lueneburger-heide-sprechen, revolver, Frankfurt 2003
Rainer Ganahl, Reading Karl Marx, Book Works, London, 2001