The residency and exhibition project How to make a bee-line tests the artistic and interpersonal approach of two artists unfamiliar with each other: Elma Riza & Petra Gell.

What both artists have in common is their desire to make the different layers of a place visible through artistic interaction, to expose historical events, but also to create new spaces that do not necessarily have a function, free and open spaces for encounters and experiments with visitors and curious passers-by.

By means of Performance and Instant Composition, the Franco-Tunisian artist Elma Riza explores the relationship between body and space, focusing in particular on the tension between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary. Like Elma Riza, the Viennese artist Petra Gell also creates spatial guidelines. In Elma Riza’s work it is often the movement of her own performing body that she marks with wool thread or tape. Petra Gell, on the other hand, draws lines that define relations between things and new spaces, using pencil, brush, monochrome and painted surfaces, as well as found materials. An eminent oscillation between two- and three-dimensionality lies in the resulting interventions, which in turn creates spatial illusion.