Story in Reverse

It is said that mankind’s oldest trick to cheat death is to pass itself and its ideas on to new generations over and over again. It is the descendants who continue stories, uphold traditions, and represent the past in the present. In Ilse Aichinger’s Spiegelgeschichte (Story in a Mirror), published in 1949, the scenes of a life unfold in reverse order, from the end to the beginning of an everyday existence. The short story portrays the life of an unnamed woman, unravelling from her funeral, through an abortion and affair, to her school days, and finally her birth. What should be an irreversible course of events is redirected through narrative devices in such a way that reproduction and the progression of time lose their apparent finality.

For Story in Reverse, Loretta Fahrenholz gave Aichinger’s piece to freelance illustrators who offer their skills via the online service platform Fiverr “on demand”, to quote the startup’s succinct slogan. The artist commissioned them to translate the story into comics, each in their own style and within the time and financial constraints of the exhibition context in which the work was originally presented. Story in Reverse brings together the resulting digital drawings, transposed onto slides, in an installation of multiple projectors running in parallel. The illustrations’ origin in the precarious self-employment of 21st century platform capitalism is thus confronted with an obsolete technology whose narrative form only works in cycles. In an endless loop, accompanied by the rhythmic sound of the devices, the various interpretations of Aichinger’s narrative run incessantly and almost indifferently one after the other. Overlapping and intermingling their different styles, they continuously reproduce the protagonist’s life, which itself defies reproduction.

In Story in Reverse, Loretta Fahrenholz attaches herself to the mostly anonymous processes of algorithmically determined image production, and in doing so creates the portrait of a social class. Its unstable present, which collides with the desire for linearity and stability, seems continuously perpetuated in the various translation processes converging in the work—of the written word into images, of the cultural past into the present.

Story in Reverse is a loan by courtesy of Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, acquired with the support of the Society of the Friends of Fine Arts Vienna 2018.