Rainer Ganahl, an artist and bicycle enthusiast, engenders with his multimedia artworks a richly allusive bicycle panopticon.

In the late nineteenth century, the bicycle started revolutionizing mobility for the masses. To the avant-garde it embodied the modern era of mechanical inventions. Rainer Ganahl, an artist and bicycle enthusiast, engenders with his multimedia artworks a richly allusive bicycle panopticon. Serving the artist as a historical central role model is the French literary figure and proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry, who imparted grotesquely exaggerated literary phantasms of ultra-potent, doped cycling athletes, therefore offering a dark and prescient vision of humans transformed through technology.

A further reference is found in the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. Ganahl, in turn, with his Bicycle Manifesto of 2011, fosters associations between the highly volatile issues related to ecological sustainability and the environmentally friendly mobility of the future, thus thematically exploring the utopian potential of the bicycle today.

Language: Englisch / German