Oscar Tuazon Builds Activist Prototypes

Emanating from a small monitor at the centre of the gallery, the voices of Goshute Chairman Rupert Steele and Ely Shoshone elder Delaine Spilsbury form the conceptual backbone of Oscar Tuazon’s first solo exhibition in Austria, ‘Words for Water’. The conservationists speak about the massacres of their ancestors, their fight against the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s plans to pump groundwater from their native land, learning from ‘mother nature’ as our ‘original teacher’, and decentring human exceptionalism towards interconnectedness and respect. Their narrative sets the tone for a show whose engagement with water is inseparable from a deep sensibility towards Indigenous history and its relationship to nature.

The video is part of Cedar Spring Water School (2023), one of three architectural structures in the exhibition that function as stages for the audience to engage with socio-environmental issues, presented alongside a selection of sculptures and paintings. Steele and Spilsbury are collaborators in the Spring Valley iteration of Tuazon’s project ‘Water School’ (2016–ongoing), in which the artist builds permanent learning spaces across the US, raising awareness of the political battles around water. Cedar Spring is a prototype for a simple dome structure made from cardboard, plywood and tape. With its polygonal, cave-like architecture, the work has a raw, retro-futurist aesthetic.

A personal highlight are the construction’s powder-printed windows featuring delicate paintings of blue circles (Cedar Spring Circle and Scholar’s Circle, both 2023). When daylight streams gently through them, they add a touch of sacredness to the otherwise-DIY look of the piece. Tuazon manages to create a surprisingly warm, inviting atmosphere that is simultaneously undergirded by a fundamental sense of fragility due to the structure’s provisional nature.

With its modular construction, Cedar Spring references Euro-American architectural experiments around self-sufficiency and nomadic living of the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, the work draws on key aspects of Steve and Holly Baer’s iconic Zome Home (1971–72), which uses water in oil drums to create a passive heating and cooling system – a technology also familiar to Indigenous architecture. The Western counter-culture movement’s primitivist appropriation of Indigenous building traditions didn’t necessary go hand in hand with a long-term engagement with, and accountability towards, Indigenous people. The artist sets an important counterexample by not treating native American homelands as a blank canvas for his practice but placing Indigenous struggles at the centre of his activist projects.

Tuazon’s use of simple building techniques and materials often gives his works an open, unfinished appearance that invites audience engagement. Occupying the back of the gallery, Building (2023) is a half-scale model of the artist’s family’s home, the design of which was based on the Coast Salish longhouses of the Pacific Northwest. Stripped back to its wooden frame – with the exception of painted windows, a fireplace and benches – the space no longer functions as a private environment. These participatory works are proposals for interacting, imagining and thinking – a refreshing sentiment in Vienna, a city full of overly pompous and inflexible architecture.

Surprisingly, the exhibition opens with the ultimate commodifiable art form: an abstract painting titled Pollen Transfer (2024). It features the imprints of blue, black, purple and neon-orange marbling ink and enamel that were dropped onto the surface of water before they touched the canvas. Alongside comparable paintings on found topographical maps at the end of the show, this unexpectedly decorative work reflects Tuazon’s engagement with water on a more poetic level. In a show that ranges between collaborative and educational action on the one hand and classical art objects on the other, Tuazon doesn’t shy away from proposing the possible co-existence of different modes of art-making.

Oscar Tuazon’s ‘Words for Water’ is on view at Franz-Josefs-Kai 3, Vienna, until 9 February 2025