Ramesch Daha: My Austria

Painter and conceptual artist Ramesch Daha dedicates her first institutional solo exhibition in Austria to the country where she lives. For the show Mein Österreich (My Austria) Daha has created a new body of work where she transforms motifs from postcards into murals.
The TAXISPALAIS was temporarily a post office. The world’s first postcard was sent within the Habsburg Empire. Since then, postcards have depicted Austria as a land of magnificent mountains and snow-covered landscapes, beautiful rivers and happy people. Following her site specific approach, Daha has selected a number of historical postcards specific to Tyrol and copied them using her signature method of “blueprint”-painting, before painting them blue on the TAXISPALAIS walls. Added texts note the voices of contemporary witnesses to Austrofascism in Tyrol. Nothing here is invented; everything seems familiar and uncanny at the same time. Daha’s paintings evoke Brechtian alienation effects. Seeing is interrupted by thinking and thinking knocks against seeing.

Mostly, Daha recreates existing images and texts through the sensual filter of painting and drawing. She paints and draws in order to recognize and understand. This is a form of memory work. In her various research series, she obsessively and meticulously reproduces what she finds in private and public archives. Such is the case with her long-term project on Sigmund Klein, her step-grandfather‘s father, who was murdered in a concentration camp in 1942. A typical Austrian story, also presented in the exhibition.
Ramesch Daha knows that remembering is a phenomenon that occurs in the now. At the same time, she insists on memorizing and opening up archives through her process of painterly copying rather than offering interpretations. The artist leaves it to the viewer to read the past in the present.