Jana Franze, the curator of the exhibition “I borrowed optimism from the past”, gives a tour of Sonja Gangl’s image worlds to interested visitors. Time and again, Sonja Gangl plays conceptually with the medium of drawing itself and the opposition of past and present, transforms the drawing with the help of current technical possibilities into the present age and correlates it with painting, photography or film. Next to background information on the artistic practice of Austrian artist Sonja Gangl and her fascination with the common housefly, Jana Franze will reveal to references to art history, which can be discovered in her work.

Jana Franze M.A. (*1986 Salzgitter, lives in Graz) is a junior curator at the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien. She studied art and media at Braunschweig University of Art. In 2014, she completed her degree with a research focus on contemporary art, visual culture, and visual war reporting. Ever since, Jana Franze’s work as a freelance and institution-based curator and author has revolved around art production and discourses of modernity and the present, their reception, and exhibition-related communication. She has worked at the Kunstverein Hannover, the National Gallery in Prague, the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, and the Kunsthalle Mannheim.