Sebastian Haselsteiner, Head of STRABAG ART, in conversation with the artist Dior Thiam, winner of the STRABAG ART Award 2025

“It is because history breaks down into images that there can be no photographic image, no force of arrestment, which does not tell us the relation between images and history, photography and memory, and space and violence.”, writes Eduardo Cadava in his essay “Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins”.

Using various mediums—ranging from painting to photography and installation—Dior Thiam’s first solo exhibition BEFORE RUINS explores the manifold relationship between image, beauty and violence.

By reworking ethnographic photographs as well as found objects, the artist deconstructs the colonial gaze as those habits of seeing that allow us to continue to consume and reproduce the violence of colonial imagery and collections.

She plays with notions of voyeurism, longing, nostalgia and sentimentality and challenges the viewer to constantly reposition themselves anew to what and how they see. The act of seeing itself thus becomes a performance, the image a space of projection.

Registration required: vb@strabag.art