We are thrilled to present the exhibition Gezählte Stunden as part of the FOTO WIEN 2025 festival. The exhibition showcases a dialogue between works by legendary German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven and Austrian photo and video artist Julia Gaisbacher, whose works are directly and personally related to one another: Gaisbacher recently spent several weeks in Darboven's former studio and living quarters, which have remained unchanged since her death in 2009. Her sensitive black-and-white photographs are juxtaposed with two room-filling wall installations by Hanne Darboven, in which she herself worked with the medium of photography.

Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) is one of the pioneers and most important representatives of conceptual art. She devoted a large part of her oeuvre to the visualization of time. As early as the 1960s, she began developing a system of numbers and codes with which she subjected calendar dates and time sequences to a new order and described them. Initially in the form of Konstruktionszeichnungen (construction drawings), diagrams, and boxes, and later through sophisticated number sequences or rhythmically appealing but precisely counted wavy lines, she recorded days, weeks, months, years, or decades. These could be her own life, the biographies of famous idols and fascinating personalities, or even historical events and entire eras. The work Stundenbuch (Book of Hours) shown in the exhibition is one of Darboven's rare photographic works. The 84 photo collages offer an expressive interpretation of the Book of Hours, a manuscript for private prayer outside of liturgy that became famous in the Middle Ages.

Darboven translates such a book of hours into formulas that manifest themselves in calligraphic lines and curvy shapes and follow an always logical structure. In doing so, she creates a deeply idiosyncratic representation with which she translates the immaterial gesture of capturing time into a kind of philosophical meditation. In the sense of Wittgenstein, she thus reveals the limits of language. Darboven's pseudo-writing is a kind of language game—an endless textual becoming that cannot be deciphered. For her, time is not linear, but something elastic, space-expanding, that can be perceived as a spatial installation, a printed book, or a melodic rhythm.

On the upper floor of the gallery, another example of Darboven's exploration of the photographic medium is on display. The work Gustav Stresemann postum (1998) shows a photograph of German Chancellor and Foreign Minister Stresemann during his speech on the German Empire's accession to the League of Nations on September 10, 1926.

Viennese artist Julia Gaisbacher (born 1983) focuses primarily on urbanism and habitation in her work. Her working method is based on extensive research and long-term observation, focusing on urban landscapes as human habitats, with the aim of capturing and documenting the connections between architecture and society through photography. Gaisbacher primarily uses digital image files as raw material and experiments with various printing techniques and substrate materials.

For her project Am Burgberg, she focused on Hanne Darboven’s former studio and residential buildings in Hamburg-Harburg. During several visits to the site, Gaisbacher took hundreds of photos and shot a film with Jörg Weil, Hanne Darboven’s long-time collaborator and partner, and Susanne Liebelt, a friend of Darboven’s since childhood.

In the black-and-white parts of the video, Gaisbacher takes inspiration from a film made by Hanne Darboven in 1981–1982 for documenta 7, accompanied by Darboven's own Opus 7 for electronic organ.

In her photographs, Gaisbacher explores the interconnections between Darboven's art and the place where it was created. In a sensitive and precise manner, she shows the artist's former workspaces as a place where the austerity of the works created here stands in seemingly irreconcilable discrepancy to the boundless passion for collecting that shaped Darboven throughout her life. Julia Gaisbacher meticulously captures the ambivalence of the place in its quaintness. Motifs of the photographs are assemblages of various objects, photographs, furniture, works of art, rummage, etc. They appear like puzzle pictures in which new details can be discovered with each viewing. In the photo essay, Hanne Darboven appears as the epitome of the homo collector. In her arrangements of cabinets of curiosities, she imbues each object with an epistemology shaped by her personal history. During her research, Gaisbacher enters into a dialogue with the conceptual artist's artistic strategies and attempts to capture the Dingsprache (language of objects).

The entirety of the photographs is characterized by different technical modes and different methods of photographic application. First, color photographs were taken with a phone as initial drafts, then with a professional digital camera, and finally converted to black-and-white images on the computer. The complex chronotopos that Gaisbacher captures in her artistic research creates spaces for new possible narratives.

Am Burgberg (Castle Hill) is not only the address of Darboven's former studio and residence; Gaisbacher's photographs subtly reveal what the term also signified for Darboven: a castle made of piles of found objects, knick-knacks, trinkets, preciosities, and memorabilia, behind which she entrenched herself in order to create and endure her haunting, austere, seemingly monotonous, yet highly emotional art.