Rainer Ganahl

Since the late nineteenth century, the bicycle has been revolutionizing the mobility of the masses. For the avant-garde, it came to embody the mechanized modern age. The artist and bicycle enthusiast Rainer Ganahl devises an evocative bicycle panopticon with his multimedia artworks. Serving as a historical role model for Ganahl is the writer and proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry, who with his grotesquely exaggerated literary visions of ultra-potent, doped cyclists drafted a bleak vision of the transformation of the human being through technology.
A further reference here is the work of Marcel Duchamp. Ganahl makes reference in his Fahrrad-Manifest (Bicycle Manifesto, 2011) to highly sensitive questions related to ecological sustainability and the environmentally friendly mobility of the future, thus thematizing the utopian quality of the bicycle today.