Monopoly

The End of Difference

Access to the side room of the Stadtgalerie Brixen is blocked by a partition wall. Behind it stands a glass vessel whose surface reflects the blue lettering of the neon work Paradies Produktion. The object is a historical lighter – a so-called Döbereiner lighter from 1830. It is based on the reaction of sulfuric acid with zinc, which produces an oxyhydrogen reaction and thereby ignites fire. Once used as a table lighter by cigar smokers, it now appears like a relic of a technological, Promethean promise.

The figure of Prometheus stands for the idea of progress made possible through technology. At the same time, the myth points to a tension: technological developments open up new possibilities for action while also creating dependencies. Humans, who see themselves as the creators of their tools, increasingly experience themselves as shaped by them – between control and loss of control.

POLY SELF

Behind a perforated wall, the lighter remains only vaguely visible – like in a confessional. The light of Paradies Produktion permeates the space and refers less concretely to paradise than to a surface of projection and production for harmony, retreat, and transgression – both an image of longing and a constructed space.

META SEX

In this context, the dance floor can be understood as a social and aesthetic space. Through the interplay of rhythm, movement, and repetition, temporary communities emerge in which perception and bodily awareness shift. Bodies lose their fixed contours, relationships become fluid, hierarchies dissolve and reform. The dance floor appears as ritual, as excess, and as a collective practice. The gallery thus becomes a resonant space in which bodies and sound intertwine. A becoming, not a state.

SOCIAL SONIC PSYCHO BLURPS

Electronic beats drift through the Stadtgalerie, fragments of language emerge, dissolve, and condense into neologisms. The musical piece, developed in collaboration with Monomono (Maurizio Nardo and Ekkehardt Rainalter), draws on a series of coined words created since 2007. These appear both as painted word-images in the space and as spoken language in sound. A feedback loop emerges: the visual becomes acoustic, the acoustic becomes visual. One hole for everything.

Hinterhuber’s works stand in the tradition of an art that understands language as material. His grid-based language-images are corporeal. The grids hold, but the content slips away. Meaning is action, language is rhythm, theory is practice. BLOB. It is not about the isolated work, but about transitions, overlaps, collective processes. Between MONO and POLY, between control and dissolution, a space emerges that cannot be fixed but is in constant motion.

Against this backdrop, the title “The End of Difference” gains sharpness. What is meant is not the abolition of all differences, but their displacement: the boundaries between art and music, image and language, as well as between body, space, and perception become permeable. What appears separate blurs together – or was never clearly separated.

SICK ASS TRASH