On Haralampi G. Oroschakoff and the Vienna Years:
Dieter Ronte, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, wrote about H.G.O. in 1981:
"Oroschakoff's art is being-there and alienation (...) He is a painter, object maker, actionist, but above all he is a brooder, (...) a profound thinker, a believer, (...) a desperate man. He shatters a canon grounded in the East-West divide and intervenes directly into the spheres of our certainty and indifference."
What swept over Vienna in 1981 at the Museum of Modern Art with an almost elemental force (fire) was described by Franz Krahberger in Freibord (No. 10/81) as an act that, through his Käfig, connected back to the finest avant-garde traditions within a Viennese art scene degraded to purely commercial and decorative functions. What struck a resonant chord with Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Walter Pichler is here, with Oroschakoff, on the threshold of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk).
Today, 40 years later, Oroschakoff remains a solitary maverick, albeit one of international stature. Born in Sofia in 1955 as a descendant of an ancient Russian lineage that left historical imprints throughout the Russian Empire and the Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms, he grew up in Vienna from the age of five, completing his schooling and taking his first artistic steps with his photo-novels beginning in the mid-1970s.
A son of emigrants: his grandfather, Haralampi G. Oroschakoff, was the last royal mayor of Sofia and a graduate of the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna; in the Stalinist show trials following 1942, he was condemned as an "enemy of the people". He disappeared into the gulags of Kuzian and later Belene. The family was stripped of both their civil rights and their name. Terror and starvation ensued, followed by exile via Belgrade and eventual arrival at the Traiskirchen transit camp in Austria as stateless refugees.
(Photography: Peter Hermann)
Oroschakoff was both a debutant at the Vienna Opera Ball and junior runner-up champion in tennis at the Wiener Park Club; drug-fueled excesses at the clubs Camera and Voom-Voom followed, alongside run-ins with the police and his first drawing-based projects. Gert Jonke wrote in 1982 in the magazine Wiener:
"In the middle of the plain stands Haral Oroschakoff, staring into the sky with his mouth open. Not because he is looking for his own reflection, but to orchestrate the flight patterns of the flocks of birds."
In 1980, his friendship and close collaboration with Robert Hunger-Bühler, Karl Welunschek, Georg Resetschnig, and Gottfried Mayrwöger began. His first video works were realized with the assistance of Paul Jenewein and Michael Epstein, alongside exhibitions in Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Munich, and Zurich. In 1982, Wolfgang Drechsler and Monika Faber titled this phase "Thinking with the Drawing Pencil" (das Denken mit dem Zeichenstift, Edition Tusch). Christian Sotriffer identified early on this turn toward Byzantine culture ("the search for the Hagios Oros") and was the first to describe Oroschakoff as a bridge-builder.
In 1984, he relocated to Munich, where his pursuit of a "Byzance après Byzance" achieved its definitive pictorial resolution in the Doppelkreuz (double cross), which remains an independent contribution to conceptual painting (see Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Issue No. 61/2003). Since then, the "wanderer between worlds" (Peter Weibel) has been at home in international art, both as a painter and as an author. His historical work on the Eastern Question, Die Battenberg-Affäre, was Berlin Verlag’s lead title at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007.
Oroschakoff has participated in the following biennials: Venice (1988), Moscow (1998), São Paulo (2004), Mar del Plata/Argentina (2014), and recently the Saturnia Film Festival Artivism in Italy. He was featured at Documenta in 1992 with the projects Atlantis 2000 and Artists for Nature, and with Kräftemessen (1994/95, Munich/Berlin) he presented the first comprehensive anthology of Russian avant-garde movements since Perestroika (published by Verlag Walter König). In 2016, Hatje Cantz published his extensive monograph, Doppelkreuz.
His recent book, Das Lächeln des Emigranten (wdpress Berlin), recounts in vivid words and images the Vienna years and his family's life on the Côte d’Azur—a secondary home in Cannes since 1969—and was reviewed across major cultural publications, culminating in an interview by Michael Maar in Die Weltwoche (Issue No. 15, April 14, 2022).
His mother Welika, now 98 years old and living in the Viennese district of Döbling, foresaw Haralampi’s return to Vienna years in advance:
"Yes, Vienna shaped my son—his world outlook and the cadence of his speech; it fed his aversion, and yet it has always remained his home."
Curatorial and Spatial Concept:
A labyrinth (see the conceptual drawing following this text) will be custom-fitted into the museum space, featuring non-uniform walls. Variations in height create the silhouette of a city, referencing its self-contained context through its built infrastructure. The comparison to theatrical stage sets is deliberate: display vitrines, objects, library elements, and monumental typographic text passages line the outer gallery walls of the museum. Text and documentary information coalesce into a unified whole; chronology, style, and recognition become questions in their own right within the Gesamtkunstwerk. The answer is left to each viewer's individual experience of space.
Two external performances activate the center and the left entrance area:
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Ich hab geträumt, ich bin aufgewacht (center): The video installation (Konzerthaus Wien, 1980) will be reconstructed on an enlarged scale (everything becomes larger and raw) and restaged with young actors and drama students. It is also conceivable that Robert Hunger-Bühler might agree to reprise his role.
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In the left entrance area: the premiere of the performance Die Maske des Narren, performed by Robert Hunger-Bühler and Haralampi G. Oroschakoff.
For this specific project, efforts will be made to enlist Marilie Fröhlich to film the performances and Rudi Molacek to direct the photographic documentation.
Production methods play an essential role here: System/Resistance as an ambivalence of beauty, objectifying reality against an interchangeable status quo.
