Artist exchange Salzburg-Merano – The new South Tyrolean daily newspaper
Kunst Meran invites you to an artist talk with Stefanie Pirker and Martina Oberprantacher on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. in the presence of Mayor Dario Dal Medico. After the talk, the artist presented the city of Meran – represented by Dario Dal Medico – with a work of art that emerged from her one-month research stay.
Stefanie Pirker was elected this year’s artist-in-residence in Merano. As part of the residency program, artists from the two partner communities of Salzburg and Meran are managed as guest artists every year. In her artistic work, Pirker deals with the areas of human-environment interaction, the contextualisation of archive material and the tension between tradition and modernity. Her works are both documentary and staged in character, using analogue as well as digital techniques.
Arrived in Meran, Pirker speak to the exciting interplay of traditional customs, their contemporary adaptations and aesthetic interpretations. In her artist-in-residence project, she deals with the history and the (supposed) everyday life of Merano. “Traubenkur in Meran” was inspired by the satirical text of the same name, which appeared in the illustrated “Die Leuchtrocket” in the 1930s, and has a collection of historical image material such as postcards as a starting point. A humorous digression is contrasted with the contemporary resonances and interpretations that arose during her stay. “There is a city, a sounding health resort, spoiled by the climate and its geographical location, rich in sun, agricultural goods, traditions, linguistic diversity and tourist attraction. And there are above all the grapes, which over the years have crowned this place as a symbol and satisfy the desire of everyone: the hard-working farmer, the nature-loving hiker, the sociable tourist and the demanding sommelier”.says Stefanie Pirker.
Stefanie Pirker was born in Kitzbühel/Tyrol in 1992 and has been living and working in the city of Salzburg since 2011. Here she studied art history and geography (MA, M.Sc.) and has been working as a freelance artist with photography as her main medium since 2019. She is a member of the FOTOHOF gallery with a special focus on archive work and teaches the course “Explorative Photography: between art and documentation” at the University of Salzburg.
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