The artist Nana Mandl (born 1991 in Graz, lives in Berlin and Vienna) elaborates, in her bright material collages, possible visual realisations of present-day media challenges and overloads. The exhibtion "shuffle repeat" features works shown for the first time in Graz, sometimes very tactile collages unifying elements of painting with forms of communicative, representational advertising, fashion, and social media. Some of the artist’s earlier works ("graveyard I", "life and death", "maybe a love stick", "follow the spaceship, donkey", all 2012) still sounded out in analogue ways these levels of representation in exhibiting the works (on drawing paper, for instance, partially protected by glass, set against different wall textures and employing photographs). In later presentations, merely by putting colored textiles with appliqued, framed collages on simple, sometimes mobile wooden display stands, the artist exposed an intersection of media that vicariously and virulently stand for the actual relationship between traditional arts and digital visual media.

In the artist’s images shown on the upper floor of the side wing of the Künstlerhaus, der Halle für Kunst & Medien all of the isolated levels of showing visual elements now come together, opulently and laden with information and reinforce references to the circulation of images and the speed of this circulation. They seem as if they haven’t yet found their final form, as if one could watch them as they take on their shapes, and at the same time one can see how strongly they rely upon this state of being circulated and reproduced. Looking more closely at some of the pictures one can also make out passages of text, such as, “Like what you see? Click here to subscribe for more...”, which also transport their digital origins and the pressure to generate attention. If you like this picture, many more are simply one click away.

Besides questions about the choice of motifs and tapping into various visual storehouses, Mandl also address other inevitable, and occasionally unpleasant questions about artistic creativity today in "shuffle repeat." Because, if technology makes all images available and disposable, how can one go on a search for motifs and look for the pictures that still try to maintain a transcendent difference?