Opening speech (excerpt) memory weaves - unweaves time, 2012, ÖBV - Atrium, Vienna

(...) Whoever wants to deal with the works of Brigitte Konyen has to make a new attempt each time, take a different path, look at an ever-changing format and thus – one could say – constantly change his or her attitude.

Once you have discovered a picture and take a closer look at it, a completely different kind of approach begins. He or she will do what any viewer of abstract works tends to do: to look for clues that correlate with the world you are familiar with. You want to recognize something that is well known to you. First of all - and the same thing happens to me - you step closer to examine a detail in the woven surface more closely and determine whether it gives a hint that makes the whole view clearer. 

Then you go back a few steps in the hope of coming across a conclusive statement in the overall view. Such an approach reveals the special appeal of Brigitte Konyen's photographic works which are usually studied very carefully. In order to get close to them, they demand to be seen from different perspectives.

But even if we recognize the face of a child in one work, the features of a growing girl in another, then again the contours of a landscape or the view out of a window - none of the views are clearly evident, rather they are separated by cuts, broken through by other views or parts of the same that have been turned, sometimes interspersed with painted stripes, by reproductions whose originals cannot be identified or cannot be clearly identified. And when we have approached a work in this way, when we are torn between recognition and irritation, when parts appear just as quickly as they dissolve again in the weaving - then we are on the trail laid out by the artist .

Because her theme is remembering, a process with the same structures as the works shown in this exhibit. Images overlap, some stand out more sharply, others lie in semi-darkness, various circumstances intertwine. Everyone knows that, at least from dreams, which are also fed by memories - and one could definitely call memories daydreams: sometimes people appear who look similar to both the one and the other acquaintance; or the furnishing of a dreamed room is made up of pieces from different dwellings in which one has once lived.

All of these phenomena are based on actual circumstances, and Brigitte Konyen proceeds accordingly. In most cases, the starting material is her own photographs, which means: as with all photographs, they are views of something that has passed and can therefore only be remembered. However, human memory does not arise primarily from detailed images, but tends to mix up several experiences and perceptions, to create their own images, to embellish what has been as well as to exclude parts of it. 

When Brigitte Konyen puts parts of her life together by combining different views, she not only reflects on her own past, of which she only lets us participate in hints and to a limited extent, but at the same time she uses photographic means to show how memories are constituted. And in this respect, here we are, all looking at a scenario that is familiar – at least in its basic features.

Timm Starl, 2012