Karl-Heinz Klopf: Play City
Factsheet
Format: Room installation
Location: 1130 Vienna, Hietzinger Kai 131, former BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre, 1010 Vienna, Rathausstraße 1, BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre
Creation: 1999–2020
Artist: Karl-Heinz Klopf (*1956 in Linz, lives and works in Vienna), www.khklopf.at
Info/Scope: Multi-part installation in the bistro of the BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre: Two pigment prints – Play City (Bagdusa) and Play City (Taipan), 1999/2003/2020 – enter into dialogue with Ohne Titel ( Play City) / Untitled (Play City), 2003/2020, an artistic intervention comprising black dots on a glass balustrade.
Dimensions: Pigment prints: 130 x 90 cm (W x H), Balustrade: 1445 x 100 cm (L x H)
Karl-Heinz Klopf: Play City
The point of departure for the Play City series of works was the joint project Art Traffic, for which pocket-sized multiples were developed – available for consumption at any time from modified cigarette vending machines in public spaces. Karl-Heinz Klopf fills polystyrene spheres into standardised boxes that spill out when opened. Thus, Play City is not a classical work but a tool formed in the moment, arousing the play instinct and associations. The random accumulations would appear to present themselves topographies, which the artist photographs and titles with hybrid terms such as “Bagdusa” (a conglomerate of Baghdad and USA) in order to lead one down the garden path once again. In 2003, the idea is continued as an installation in situ for the BUWOG exhibition GegenLicht as a black “landscape of dots” that shades the café window from the sunlight. In 2020, the artist redesigned the work for the BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre in 1010 Vienna, where the landscape of dots enters into a spatial and thematic dialogue with the two pigment prints.
