Acceleration as homelessness. Home always has something to do with longing, said Carl Aigner, director of the Lower Austrian State Museum, in his introduction to the exhibition. Through our “embedding in a consumer society”, though, the feeling for it has been lost — art, however, can open the way back to it. “Art always has something to do with the search for home,” said Aigner: “discovering the world, perceiving it, understanding it — in relation to our own existence too.” The vision of art is “the winning of home”, of “understanding where one is and who one is”. Aigner advised taking time and letting oneself into the works, “because we live at such speed that we can no longer dwell on anything”. That, too, is a form of homelessness.
“HEIM.ArT” is a term open to interpretation in many ways, writes Bishop Küng in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue. “Heim” — home — has something to do with “Herz”, the heart. In an artist's work there is always his life's blood too: “it expresses something genuinely of him or her.” At the same time the work, by offering itself to contemplation, creates openness towards others and so makes encounter possible. In that, Küng sees parallels with religion: “It does not impose itself, but it is there. It shows itself, but does not seize hold one-sidedly. It allows itself to be discovered, but must also want to be discovered. It comes from God into the innermost part of a person, and on the human side it lives only out of that innermost part. Out of its essence, which is love, it brings forth beauty — around the beholder and within him.”
The exhibition was curated by Ursula Fischer of the Galerie am Lieglweg in Neulengbach, Renate Minarz of the Schupfengalerie in Herzogenburg, and Doris Kloimstein of the P.E.N. Club. The artists are Barbara Füreder, Andrea Hochmuth, Brigitte Hofmann, Ingeborg Hörzenberger-Haiden, C.F.J. König, Monika Lederbauer, Erich Leonhard, Martina Luef, Cinthia Mitterhuber, Gerda Prantl, Georg Pummer and Hannah Winkelbauer (visual art), together with Sidonia Gall, Sabine M. Gruber, Judith Hafner, Margit Jordan, Roland Jordan, Angela Jursitzka and Alexander Peer (literature).