Curator’s tour

On the final day of the exhibition Considering the Collection & The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs, you will have the opportunity to meet the artist Ana Torfs during a guided tour. Ana Torfs’s cycle of works of 28 Jacquard tapestries is juxtaposed with historical works from the Art Collections of the Academy and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

On her walks during the time of the momentous Covid pandemic, the artist collected all sorts of brightly coloured autumn leaves, a process that reminded her of the Cumaean Sybil in Virgil’s ancient epic The Aeneid, who would write her prophecies on leaves. Torfs dries the collected leaves between the pages of international ‘dailies’. She then photographs these arrangements and finally has them woven into large-format tapestries, supplemented with personal anaphors, verse-like sayings. The texts and images combined in this way form a fragmentary tableau on the state of our world as it is today. The lyrical fabric confers to the fleeting nature of quotidian life an alleged permanence through the medium of textiles, emphasising the nature of a historically memorable present whose repercussions on the future are unforeseeable. Just as the breeze scattered the leaves after the Sybil’s prophecy, it seems impossible to draw any reliable prospects for action from the incessant flow of media broadcasts. And given the possibilities offered by manipulative digital techniques, news events remain increasingly Sibylline and, indeed, enigmatic.

Curated by Sabine Folie and Synne Genzmer

(Guided tour in German and English)

Limited number of participants, registration required at +43 1 588 16 2201
or kunstsammlungen@akbild.ac.at

Cost: Admission fee to the Paintings Gallery, guided tour free of charge