Shelf is Austrian artist Marina Faust’s second exhibition at Song Song.  As in her first exhibition with the gallery, wherein a group of second-hand chairs equipped with wheels for rolling at once asserted themselves as a total artwork and refused to offer up any rules for engaging them as such, Shelf returns to the problematic boundary-zone of what constitutes a state of art.  This time the project addresses a moment in the object’s life that is not its ‘art’ moment, that is some place perhaps just before or after art, an off beat wherein the ways by which we identify the object are made unstable, called into question.

In Shelf the frame, or apparatus of support, skews the object against the context, opens a rift in the space of the gallery through which another identity for the thing can be seen, equally true though not at all appropriate to the moment: as much storage device as means of exhibition, Shelf uses the space of art work as the platform for a question of what a before-art or after-art work is, of what an art work becomes if it is in no position to be looked at.

Abraham Orden, Vienna 2010