The exhibition VON BIS / FROM TO by the Austrian artist Marina Faust at Phileas, The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, in Vienna, Austria, is conceived in collaboration with the Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine in Limoges, France. Co-produced by Phileas, this solo exhibition is also a preview of her forthcoming presentation at the Frac, titled Sans contrefaçon, anatomie d’un vêtement [Without Imitation – Anatomy of a Garment], which will open in the autumn.
The exhibition focuses on Faust’s shoe series, which has never been shown in an institutional context before. In this body of work from the early 2000s, shoes appear not as everyday or fashion objects but as complex architectural structures. Over the course of many years, Faust collected different types of shoe ranging from fashion design to fetish footwear to then deconstruct them and alter their forms.
Faust explores objects in relation to function and its absence. Through subtle interventions and shifts in context, familiar items relinquish their original purpose and assume a new presence as autonomous sculptural forms.
This approach has shaped Faust’s artistic practice since her early photographic works. In her series Miniatures from the late 1980s, she isolated everyday gestures, fragmenting and removing them from their original context, thus rendering them highly abstract. The works oscillate between familiarity and irritation, proximity and distance, drawing attention to the structures and surfaces of things.
Everyday life is a central point of departure in Faust’s artistic practice. Both in photography and sculpture, she examines ordinary objects and situations by placing them in new configurations. She uses processes of appropriation, transformation, and contextual shifts to imbue familiar and found items with new layers of meaning. The perception, function, and cultural ascriptions of an object are thus continuously renegotiated.
