Ines Doujak

Ines Doujak’s work – a variant of her Documenta XI work “Hortus-Conclusus-Fiktion” – pleads passionately against the patenting of human and plant life by transnational corporations. Two large sacks filled with fertilizer represent the food base of the flora monopolized by corporations. Stuck into the sacks are demonstration signs with a stick and poster. In the combination of material, image, and textual information, the work remains curiously ambivalent. The thematic field is also a visual agricultural field; the genetic manipulation imagines a garden of earthly delights, where weeds prevail.

Text extract by Vitus Weh:

In 2007, the installation »Siegesgärten | Victory Gardens« by Ines Doujak was one of the most popular works of art at documenta 12 in Kassel. Doujak’s large pot with plants, standing high on branches painted white, was always surrounded by people. A lot was noticeably wrong here: on the one hand the white branches that grew downwards like bleached bones, and on the other hand the »plants above« that were not flowers, but little bags of seeds with disturbing pictures and texts printed on them.

Biography

Ines Doujak (1959 Klagenfurt, Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Austria.