“Atlases” are a group of works that Franz Kapfer has continuously developed since his stay in Mexico in 2014, the production process of which visitors to the Kyiv Biennale (2023) were able to follow live in a Viennese shop as “HKW Armourer / HKW-Waffenschmiede” and which were first shown in the exhibition “Alanten – Ich oder das Chaos” 2024 in the Halle für Kunst Steiermark in Graz.
In architecture, atlases are generally referred to as muscular, larger-than-life male columnar figures, in reference to Atlas, the titanic sky bearer of Greek mythology. The approximately 1200-year-old, Mesoamerican warriors from Tula, not far from Mexico City, are also interpreted post-Columbian as Atlantes, and it is to them in particular that Kapfer refers in his exhibition, transferring them to a variety of contemporary weapons and body armour that are standard military equipment today. He has handcrafted oversized wooden objects such as pistols, submachine guns, protective waistcoats and helmets from several layers of wood and coloured them matt black. Most of these objects, whose precise workmanship is reminiscent of their smaller steel or rubber models, are stored in transport boxes with the lids open so that they can be seen.
“Historical accuracy is of central importance to Kapfer because not everything is actually theatre. When it comes to weapons, it is not just any weapons, but the American sniper rifle Ruger Precision Rifle 308 Gen 1, the Austrian Glock 17 pistol, the Russian Kalashnikov AK12 assault rifle or the Japanese tonfa baton. In this regard, the artist resembles a butterfly collector, for whom it is part of his job to give a name to the creatures he systematically captures and spears,” says Roger M. Buergel in the catalogue text.
Franz Kapfer adds colourful cutting templates to the objects according to which he made them. They are calibrated to the size of a 4.6 metre tall warrior, a ‘super warrior’, as he winkingly calls his fantasy figure in an interview, for whom these utensils are intended. Kapfer ties the Toltec warrior caste back to ‘the warriors of today, the soldiers and policemen of whatso-ever power, together with their equipment, their weapons, their disguises, which serve not only to protect their soft flesh’, says Buergel. This reconnection ‘transforms the militarised present into an archaeological site’, through which visitors to the exhibition wander with a torch in their hand. Here, among all the artificial militaria, art poses the question of ‘whether this is our reality (yes, it is), and whether it has to be like this.’
Appropriation is a term of art that we have often encountered since the 1970s. The object (which we know from the everyday world) is artistically appropriated and thus stripped of its original ideological meanings. Kapfer strips his armoury of atlases of their traditional social connotations with a mixture of an ostensive masculine pose, manual and physical commitment and serious obsession, thereby making these objects unassailable for (cultural) political appropriation and at the same time more resistant as warning signs of the human understanding of power, greed and desire. Or, as Rainer Fuchs notes, Kapfer makes ‘the often suppressed or denied power-political motives of religious and secular ideologies recognisable in their everyday and existential effects, without falling into a didactic or moralising attitude.
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