WILL - The Lifesaving

Machines

About the Exhibition

As part of “Eyes On – Vienna Month of Photography”, the Josephinum presents recent photographic works by Reiner Riedler. WILL, as the expansive cycle is titled, is a journey into the world of medicine. Abducted from their usual hospital environment, freed from its architectural limits and the presence of practicing doctors and nurses, as well as patients, it is the curious machines and apparatuses that are used daily in modern medicine that Riedler portrays. Modern dialysis, anesthesia and breathing devices, artificial hearts, heart-lung machines and pacemakers are the culmination of centuries of intellectual curiosity and inventiveness, and of humankind’s striving to prolong our earthly life to the greatest extent possible.

Monochrome backgrounds emphasize the deliberate isolation of the objects and the removal of important clues that might enable the layperson to correctly identify the instruments exhibited. Viewers, confronted by objects that seem in equal parts functional and sculptural, whose exact use they can only grasp at, are part fascinated by the aesthetic qualities of the devices, part unsettled by the possibility of coming into contact with them as patients themselves.

Curator: Moritz Stipsicz