Rainer Ganahl


Rainer Ganahl is an Austrian-American artist. His work consists of photographs, videos and performances.

Life

From 1986 until 1991, he studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was a member of the 1990/91 Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. He is currently a professor of visual arts at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart.

Work

Rainer Ganahl started his career exploring computer based art, a pioneering field for its time. His first exhibition in this area was demonstrated at Philomene Magers in 1990.
His best known work, S/L , is an ongoing series of photographs, begun in 1995, of well-known cultural critics addressing audiences. The photographs, taken in university class rooms and lecture halls, not only show the lecturer but also the listeners and students in the audience. In a similar way, he documented his own process of learning an "exotic" language into an art project.
In his Imported-Reading Seminars held from 1995 onward, the group study of theoretical works from specific countries were documented on video. His exhibition "El Mundo" at Kai Matsumiya was recently listed as one of the top exhibitions of 2014 by the New York Times., and the film was subsequently acquired in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirschorn Collection at the Smithsonian.
Rainer Ganahl represented Austria at the 1999 Venice Biennale.