The solo exhibition Polizeipferde für Österreich (Police Horses for Austria) by Jonas Höschl at Bildraum 01 presents a documentation of his performative intervention of the same name, which took place as part of the opening of the Vienna art fair Parallel Vienna 2026.

The work takes as its starting point the plans to introduce a mounted police unit in Vienna, which the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior prepared politically between early 2018 and late 2019. Horses were purchased, and a trial operation and training program were launched. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán donated two black horses to the Austrian government for this purpose. The project sparked public controversy and was criticized by numerous groups—including the opposition, the police union, and animal welfare organizations. In April 2019, the mounted police were out on the streets of downtown Vienna for the first time, training under real-world conditions. After costing approximately 2.5 million euros, the project was discontinued in late 2019 in the wake of the Ibiza scandal and the subsequent new elections.

By reenacting a real, yet ultimately unsuccessful measure, featuring two performers in authentic police uniforms on horseback, the piece explores the discrepancy between political symbolism and reality. Jonas Höschl’s Polizeipferde für Österreich physically recreates a measure that has been abandoned—one that most Austrians know only from media debates— while simultaneously stripping it of any functional effectiveness. This raises questions surrounding the aesthetics and mechanisms of authoritarian politics.