The Gym

Vienna Art Week

The Gym is a hybrid space that interweaves exhibition, training and performance and sees itself as a counter-project to stereotypical body cultures, market-conforming standardization and other manifestations of neoliberally based self-optimization. A varied training program with weekly classes, extensive Sunday sessions and mental workouts will form the pulsating core of the exhibition space for five weeks. Together with around 40 participating artists, trainers and performers, the movement and thought radius of inclusive body politics and non-toxic fitness will be expanded, the mind-muscle connection strengthened and resistance training for body, mind and soul offered. Pleasure included

Exhibition

The Gym exercises our physical and mental capacity for resistance in the spirit of joyful activism, calling for individual and collective reappropriation of body and mind. The exhibition features positions by Anna Ehrenstein, Eisa Jocson, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Howardena Pindell, Karin Ferrari, Kubra Khademi, Mel Baggs, Philipp Muerling, Sophia Süßmilch, Suzanne Lacy, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Tianzhuo Chen, VALIE EXPORT. In their respective practices, the artists* dive below the surface and search for strategies and logics of resistance to break up power structures, to disrupt and challenge mechanisms of seeing and perception. The artistic works understand protest as a training program for the body, take patriarchal and colonial body images apart, or play with set pieces from the fitness industry and question them in the context of a neoliberal understanding of spirituality.

ART SPACE

Sandleiten Hof, Liebknechtgasse 32, 1160 Wien

info@sohostudios.at

SOHO Studios

SOHO STUDIOS are an open space for art, culture and social exchange in Sandleitenhof, Vienna-Ottakring.

The program includes exhibitions, performances, tool talks, workshops, story mornings, concerts with free admission – with a special focus on culturally interested audiences of all generations and the neighborhood.

SOHO STUDIOS, with the Kunstlabor, Freiraum and kunstschule.wien, have more than 800m2 of exhibition space and house six studios. The premises of SOHO STUDIOS can also be rented.