Talking Through Weibel asks a simple, far-reaching question: how do exhibitions and archives teach us—artists, researchers, and the wider public—how to see, remember, and think?

Taking the current exhibition Thinking Through Weibel and the Weibel Archiv as an opening path, the evening explores art as a learning system: how exhibitions and collections structure cultural memory, how digitization can widen (and bias) access, and how exhibition-making can produce embodied, situated knowledge that differs from conventional academic formats.

Looking at Peter Weibel himself—artist, theorist, institution-builder—and drawing on his extensive, partly digital archive, the evening considers how large-scale collections can be made meaningfully accessible: through digitization and metadata practices, open interfaces and display strategies, as well as curatorial and pedagogical frameworks that invite plural forms of learning.

The program starts with a guided tour of the exhibition, continues with a keynote on “What is Contemporary Art History?” and culminates in a roundtable that considers exhibitions and archives as shared infrastructures of learning. Rather than closing a legacy, we open questions and methods—testing how playful, critical, and inclusive practices can shape what and how we learn together.

Programm:

• 17:30 – Curator’s tour of the exhibition with Brooklyn J. Pakathi (45 min.)
• 18:30 – Keynote lecture by Boris Čučković Berger (30 min.)
• 19:00 – Panel & Q&A (60 min.) with Robert Müller, Brooklyn J. Pakathi, Margit Rosen, Charlotte Reuß. Moderation: Denise H. Sumi
• followed by a festive closing

Short biographies:

Boris Čučković Berger is a Professor of Art History and Digital Image Cultures at LMU Munich (since Aug 15, 2021). His work focuses on critical studies of art and technology, especially digital production and the socio-technical conditions of platform economies; previously he taught modern and contemporary art at The Courtauld Institute of Art (Associate Lecturer, 2017–2021). He holds a PhD from the Courtauld (2019).

Robert Müller is an artist based in Vienna and Berlin. He is co-editor of the online magazine The Critical Ass and, since 2013, has organized the exhibition series Nousmoules in Vienna and Berlin.  He was a curator at Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft (2021- 2022). Since 2022 he has worked as Senior Scientist / Curator at the Kunstsammlung und Archiv of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Brooklyn J. Pakathi is a Vienna-based transmedia artist whose practice critically engages ontologies of emotion through material and spatial interventions. Informed by phenomenology and affect theory, their work examines configurations of intimacy, melancholy, and longing, challenging and reconfiguring the boundaries between the tangible and the immaterial. As an independent curator, Pakathi’s research focuses on decolonial methodologies, cultural equity, and alternative epistemologies that address technology and spatial practice.

Margit Rosen is an art historian and curator; since 2016 Head of Collections, Archives & Research at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. She studied art history, political science, philosophy, and media arts (LMU Munich, HfG Karlsruhe, Paris I) and edited the MIT Press volume A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art (2011).

Charlotte Reuß researches digital cultures, copyright law, and the dynamics of commercialization and cultural accessibility. In her ongoing doctoral dissertation, she investigates user strategies within digital cultures in late capitalism. Since 2020, she has been teaching and conducting research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and currently coordinates the Weibel Online project at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures.

Denise H. Sumi is a Senior Scientist and doctoral researcher at the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna, focusing on network cultures, relational ethics and critical pedagogy. Previously, she coordinated the Digital Solitude program and served as editor-in-chief of the platform Schlosspost at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2019–2024).