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EYES | OCHI

9/10/202215/10/2023

Sigmund Freud Museum

Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien

IN MEMORIAM ANNA FREUD

“These ‘eyes’ speak to the necessity to pause, to reflect, to turn to oneself and look at the world guided by one’s own feeling” – and this is why these “windows to the soul” are at the center of the installation EYES | OCHI, which was created in a small village near the city of Lviv in 2016.

There, in a space called “Prostir RaDity” (“Room of Children’s Joy”), numerous children find board and shelter during the weeks of summer, which gives them a chance to face up to the traumatic ramifications of the war in Ukraine. Founded in 2015, following the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbas, it has become a fixture and a point of reflection. “Prostir RaDity” is supervised by psychotherapists, artists, musicians, philosophers and other to address the external and internal injuries and dangers of war.

In the photo installation EYES | OCHI in the Showroom Berggasse 19, we are confronted with a richly layered kaleidoscope of children’s gazes, and with their struggle for a better future. During World War II, Anna Freud, child analyst and youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, also addressed the question of coping strategies after the experience of war – of how much states of anxiety and particularly the loss of (psychological) parents affect children’s psyches. October 9, 2022, is the 40th anniversary of her death, which is why the Sigmund Freud Museum dedicates the presentation of EYES | OCHI to her memory and to her important work Young children in war-time: a year’s work in a residential war nursery (first published in 1942).

Eyes of a child of "Prostir RaDity“, detail of installation, photo: Oliver Ottenschlaeger

The Belvedere - 300 Years a Venue for Art

2/12/20227/01/2024

Unteres Belvedere

Rennweg 6, 1030 Wien

It took more than a decade to build the summer residence of Vienna’s most famous general, Prince Eugene of Savoy. In 1723, construction of the upper palace drew to a close and the Belvedere estate was finally completed. The 300th anniversary of this event presents the perfect occasion for the museum to reflect on its history. Both as a museum and a landmark building, the Belvedere has stood for power and prestige throughout the ages, serving as the setting for courtly festivities, at times as a royal residence, and as the venue for the signing of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. In an extensive exhibition, the museum will examine the building’s changing roles.

Curated by Björn Blauensteiner, Sabine Grabner, Kerstin Jesse (Contributed to the concept), Alexander Klee, Georg Lechner, Stefan Lehner, Monika Mayer and Luisa Ziaja.

Moderne Galerie 1903 [Bildarchiv BA6] © Belvedere, Wien

Extinctions!?

23/02/20232/04/2024

Weltmuseum Wien

Heldenplatz, 1010 Wien

An exhibition as part of the project TAKING CARE

In light of the ongoing climate crisis and its impact on biodiversity, questions and fears of endangerment and loss are at the centre of public discourse. A sixth major extinction event is expected in the course of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the age in which humans become the most important factor influencing the biological, geological and atmospheric processes of the Earth.

 

In collaboration with partners from Latin America in particular, this exhibition questions common narratives of extinction and retells them from other perspectives.

The collections of the Weltmuseum Wien contain objects that can be used to tell stories about the extinction of human cultures, but which also talk about their resilience and survival.

Zemi belt, Taino, Greater Antilles, 1520–1560, snail shells, teeth, cotton, obsidian, brass, glass mirror, Ambras Collection, Weltmuseum Wien © KHM-Mu

ON STAGE – All the Art World’s a Stage

15/03/20237/01/2024

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Museumsplatz 1,1070 Wien

The exhibition ON STAGE explores the various theatrical and stage-related forms of expression in art since the 1960s, when a neo-avant-garde critical of tradition began focusing on performative and actionist art forms that endowed artists with a stage-like presence, often in front of an audience. The Viennese Actionism with its provocative and time-critical theatricality is just as much a part of this as the Vienna Group, whose literary cabaret stands firmly in the tradition of Dadaist theater, or the Fluxus-Movement with its media crossovers. Alongside these maledominated art forms, a feminist scene established itself that portrayed and challenged the effects of patriarchal social hierarchies on gender roles. They form the historical basis for more recent positions that oppose conservatively determined gender roles and images of identity, as well as racism and colonialism. Other thematic areas include musical and cinematic productions, (self-)representations and rituals of the art business as well as works in which viewers become actors. The exhibition shows 150 works and work series, most of which are culled from the holdings of the mumok collection.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled

Science Fiction(s) - If there were a tomorrow

30/03/20239/01/2024

Weltmuseum Wien

Heldenplatz, 1010 Wien

With the highlight exhibition Science Fiction(s), the Weltmuseum Wien presents speculative narratives for the future. With installations, paintings and films, the show looks at various ideas of the future.

 

How do we shape a future worth living with and for all? Science Fiction(s) presents voices that are often excluded from Hollywood’s narratives about the future. Works by around twenty contemporary artists highlight different strategies for using science fiction as a tool for critiquing the present, creating alternative futures, healing and decolonisation. The science fiction film architects KAWA (current film: Rubikon) have created an exciting architectural environment in which the paintings, installations, museum objects, films, and games present the visions of artists and activists and invite visitors to immerse themselves in these different worlds.

Cara Romero, The Zenith, 2022, Photograph. Printed by the artist on Legacy Platine paper © Cara Romero

Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light

31/03/20237/01/2024

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Museumsplatz 1,1070 Wien

mumok presents New York artist Adam Pendleton’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Europe. Pendleton’s painting is a continuous index in which gestures are recorded, transposed, and overwritten. Since 2008 he has articulated much of his work through the idea of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. In his paintings, drawings, and other works, a visual philosophy of incomplete postulates emerges, flattening the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange.

Installation view, Adam Pendleton, Blackness, White and Light, Foto: Klaus Pichler ©mumok

No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection

20/04/202328/01/2024

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier

Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

The comprehensive, international group exhibition No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection revolves around the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Skopje’s unusual collection of modern works, as well as the historical and political context of this extraordinary project.

 

After the massive earthquake that hit Skopje (then Yugoslavia) in 1963, there was a huge effort to help rebuild the devastated city, as a large-scale gesture of international solidarity. The decision was made to establish a museum of contemporary art as a key cultural element of the reconstruction, and thousands of works were donated to Skopje by artists from around the world.

 

The collection of MoCA Skopje represents both a time capsule of international art at a moment when modernism was still in its prime and a rare artistic encounter across the Cold War divide between East and West: it includes many artworks by predominantly white and male figures who will be well recognizable to an art-loving public, but it also goes beyond the established canon of modernism and incorporates often fascinating works by artists who hail from the former Eastern bloc, as well as from the Global South.

Installation view: No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, Kunsthalle Wien 2023, photo: www.kunst-dokumentation.com

AGNES FUCHS. Her Eyes Were Green

5/05/20238/10/2023

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Museumsplatz 1,1070 Wien

Agnes Fuchs employs painting, videos, and installations as means to reconfigure the scientific and technological instruments and processes that paved the way for contemporary digital technologies. Operating instructions, functional descriptions, and manuals for oscilloscopes, computers, power supply units, or measuring devices serve as the departure point for her work. By analyzing the cultural implications of these communication media, her artistic practice intervenes in a historical field as well as the afterimages it continues to produce today.

 

Fuchs uses and transforms her source material—not only the technological devices themselves but also their prevalent, disseminated forms. She creates depictions of images that are stored and circulate (often unconsciously) in collective memory. The materiality of painting counters the digital simulacrum or virtuality of circulating images and narratives with a sensory physical experience.

 

Curated by Franz Thalmair

Elisabeth Wild: Imagination Factory

5/05/20237/01/2024

mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Museumsplatz 1,1070 Wien

The turbulent biography of Elisabeth Wild (née Pollak, * 1922 in Vienna, † 2020 in Panajachel, Guatemala) reads like a recap of the twentieth century. Marked by flight and displacement, national identification and disidentification, her life seemed constantly to hit the reset button. This is not least evident in her oeuvre, which is highly diverse in terms of the media she used—including painting, sculpture, and textile design as well as collages and subsequent installations. mumok presents her first retrospective exhibition, turning the spotlight on her late works as well as her previously unknown early works.

 

With her first major presentation in Vienna, Wild’s story comes full circle. At the heart of the conceived exhibition is her artistic development, which reads like a ride through twentieth- and twenty-first-century art history. Early and late works are juxtaposed on two of mumok’s exhibition levels. Though the two creative periods seem contrary at first glance—one might assume they are not from the same artist—a closer inspection reveals kinships that bespeak the artist’s early interests. Collaged works display architectural and scenic fragments as well as masklike traits or geometric patterns. The collages thus combine Wild’s early landscapes, portraits, and textile designs in a purely abstract form.

Exhibition view: Elisabeth Wild. Fantasiefabrik, Photo: Klaus Pichler / mumok

YOSHITOMO NARA: ALL MY LITTLE WORDS

10/05/20231/11/2023

Albertina modern

Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) is one of the best-known artists of his generation worldwide. Since the 1990s, he has attracted international attention with his so-called “Angry Girls,” heavily stylized images of girls with grim expressions, vampire fangs, and knives in their hands. With their childlike cuteness, the figures recall the aesthetics of comics and cartoons, ranging from snotty brats to naïve, sweet-looking characters.

All My Little Words at the Albertina modern focuses on Nara’s multifaceted oeuvre of drawings, which developed over a period of some forty years and is presented here in a Petersburg hanging arranged by the artist himself. The exhibition ranges from early experimental works on paper and a number of paintings and sculptures to an expansive installation.

Yoshitomo Nara | Miss Margaret, 2016 | Private Collection, United States of America © Yoshitomo Nara | Foto: Yoshitomo Nara

Maximilian Prüfer: Fruits of Labour

18/05/20239/07/2024

Weltmuseum Wien

Heldenplatz, 1010 Wien

The exhibition is dedicated to the conceptual artist Maximilian Prüfer (*1986). While raising questions about the role of nature in and as art, his artwork focuses on ecological, political, and sociocultural issues. The exhibition addresses two campaigns initiated by Mao Zedong (1893–1976) – the Four Pests Campaign of 1958 and Mao’s Gifts of 1968 – and discusses their effects in China. At the same time, it examines which questions the campaigns gave rise to in Austria, Europe, and around the world.

Honey Pictures (series), Maximilian Prüfer, Photo print on Baryta, 2022 © Maximilian Prüfer

Exhibitions

Gregor Schmoll: Puparium: Atelier/Studio

16/06/202320/10/2023

Österreichische Friedrich und Lillian Kiesler-Privatstiftung

Mariahilfer Straße 1b/1, 1060 Wien

In January 1945, the artist-architect Frederick Kiesler (1890 – 1965) and the photographer Percy Rainford (1901 – 1976) met the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) in Duchamp’s New York studio in order to take pictures of the space and produce portraits for a photo collage. Following Kiesler and Duchamp’s instructions, Rainford captured the atelier from a series of unusual camera angles. Kiesler then assembled these images to create a folding photographic triptych – Les Larves d’Imagie d’Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp – for the art magazine View (No. 1, March 1945), which was dedicated to Marcel Duchamp.

 

The original prints, which can now be found in the archive of the Frederick Kiesler Foundation, provide the starting point for Gregor Schmoll’s new work Puparium: Atelier/Studio. In the work, Schmoll moves between objective sobriety and eulogistic transfiguration as he paraphrases both the photographic documentation and the photographic documents themselves. He uses this playful re-enactment to deconstruct the assumption that photography captures “reality” with pictorial accuracy and expose the “mythmaking” that interprets the studio space as a mysterious place of artistic creation.

 

Gregor Schmoll (*1970 in Bruck an der Mur/Austria) lives and works in Vienna.

 

Opening event: Thursday, Jun 15, 6 pm

Gregor Schmoll, Puparium: Atelier/Studio, Inv.Nr.: PHO_5758/0-2020, 2020, gelatin silver print, 25.3 x 20.4 cm © Gregor Schmoll / Bildrecht, Vienna 20

Exhibitions

In Love with Laura - A Mystery in Marble

20/06/202315/10/2023

KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM WIEN

Maria-Theresien-Platz, 1010 Wien

This exhibition focusses on a central work of European sculpture: Francesco Laurana’s (c. 1430–1502) Female Bust at the Kunstkammer Wien.

 

It is one of the few Renaissance marble busts with colouring. The work is one of the most significant creations of fifteenth century portrait sculpture. This small but prestigiously appointed exhibition is set to rekindle public interest in the exceptional importance of this object, which has somewhat fallen into oblivion in the last decades. The exhibition will be the first to showcase a thesis formulated some time ago that this is a portrait of the mysterious Laura who was so deeply (but unhappily) beloved by the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch. Petrarch wrote over three hundred touching poems for Laura in the fourteenth century.

 

Next to masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum like Giorgione’s painting Laura, the exhibition will feature international loans from the Frick Collection in New York and the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.

©Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

Exhibitions

CLOSE/D - ARTISTIC EXPLORATIONS IN NEIGHBOURING ENVIRONMENTS

28/06/202331/10/2023

KUNST HAUS WIEN. Museum Hundertwasser

Untere Weißgerber Straße 13, 1030 Wien

Through its CLOSE/D project, Kunst Haus Wien has chosen to enter into a dialogue with its neighbourhood and the city as a whole. Twelve artistic interventions in the public space feature ecological perspectives on the present and the future. A free programme of events invites visitors to participate in and around the TRÖSCH III Community Centre.

 

Over a period of four months, the Museum will be taking a broader look at its immediate surroundings and its social environment through an outdoor exhibition, adopting a neighbourly approach in the process: twelve artistic positions will feature in the public space, opening up diverse ecological perspectives on the present and the future. The invited artists will engage in a dialogue with the Earth and the atmosphere, with the flora and fauna, the Danube Canal, the urban infrastructure and architecture, and with neighbours, visitors and passers-by. The exhibition will be accompanied by workshops, neighbourhood field trips, performances and discussions on ecological and socially relevant topics. At its centre is TRÖSCH III, a retail unit that has been vacant for some time and now provides a pop-up community centre offering multiple activities.

 

CLOSE/D conquers new ground, i.e. the public space, so people are able to join in and take part – in passing, as it were. The public space becomes a laboratory for a new way of thinking about society and the way it is integrated into the planetary ecosystem: a place that shows not only what already exists, but also what might still exist. The project seeks to stimulate a lively debate on ecological issues, on visions for inclusive coexistence in the world both today and tomorrow, and on the potential of artistic narratives.

 

ALL FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT CLOSE/D AT CLOSED.KUNSTHAUSWIEN.COM

Exhibitions

On the New: Viennese Scenes and Beyond – Part 2

14/07/202315/10/2023

Belvedere 21 – Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst

Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Wien

What is going on in local art scenes, studios, and alternative exhibition spaces? And how can one exhibition capture the diversity of the production and presentation of art?

 

Belvedere 21 already explored these questions with the 2019 show On the New. Young Scenes in Vienna, developing a dynamic, collaborative format that involved multiple contributors and a shared curatorial authorship. In addition to presenting eighteen individual artistic positions, twelve Viennese project spaces hosted rotating exhibitions within the show, each kicked off with a ‘midissage’ (midway opening) complemented by discursive events and performances.

 

In 2023, On the New. Viennese Scenes and Beyond picks up this thread and expands on the original concept. In order to provide a broader view of contemporary approaches, strategies, and discourses, the survey now also includes artists and project spaces from other parts of Austria. In an expanded dynamic, the show presents fourty-four artists and twenty-four exhibitions within the exhibition—curated by individual project spaces—and thus offers fresh perspectives on what art can be today, on its themes, aesthetics, and forms of expression, and how it is perceived.

 

This polyphonic tracing of the “new”–despite the ambivalence this term and its function imply especially in contemporary art–presents no grand overview, but rather, an image of a growing entity without beginning or end, in perpetual flux.

Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

Exhibitions

Hubert Scheibl: steps of evolution

4/09/202314/10/2023

Galerie Ernst Hilger

Dorotheergasse 5, 1010 Wien

Hubert Scheibl – steps of evolution

4 Sep – 14 Oct 2023

Galerie Ernst Hilger

Hubert Scheibl, we are all animals, 2006

Exhibitions

Robert Gabris: Award exhibition Belvedere Art Award

8/09/202318/02/2024

Belvedere 21 – Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst

Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Wien

The Belvedere Art Award was established in 2022 to reflect forward-looking dynamics in society and contemporary art. The art award advances an inclusive, queer-feminist, future- and diversity-oriented approach in response to current discourses and the awareness of the many exclusions in the museum and exhibition fields, not the least of which is manifested in the awarding of prizes.

 

The biennal Belvedere Art Award is sponsored by Vendome Projects and was launched in cooperation with the Belvedere. Local and international experts determine the prize winner: in a two-stage selection process, each of the five nomination jury members identifies two emerging artists with a connection to Austria. A five-member selection jury then determines the winner of the award. Age, gender, and nationality do not play a role in the selection process.

 

The Belvedere Art Award is endowed with 20,000 euros. In addition to the prize money, the award winner receives a solo exhibition at the Belvedere 21 and an accompanying publication. An international jury selected Robert Gabris as the winner of the Belvedere Art Award 2022 on November 28.

Photo: Michal Blecha

Exhibitions

Collector's Choice - curated by Christoph la Garde

12/09/202314/10/2023

Hilger Next

Collector’s Choice – curated by Christoph la Garde

12 Sep – 14 Oct 2023

Hilger NEXT

With works by: Negra Bernhard, Chun, Louise Deininger, Aklima Iqbal, Dominik Scharfer, Osama Zat

Aklima Iqbal, Over-Overlapping, 2023

Exhibitions

ANDREA BISCHOF, OLIVER DORFER, MICHAEL KOS: DOTS & LAYERS

14/09/20236/10/2023

STRABAG Kunstforum

Donau-City-Straße 9, 1220 Wien

The title of the exhibition Dots & Layers refers to the common denominators in the latest works by Andrea Bischof, Oliver Dorfer and Michael Kos. Dots and layers are at the same time stylistic devices and references to the working practice in their different artistic approaches. While Bischof’s works are dominated by colour spaces, Dorfer’s focus is on the narrative component. Kos, on the other hand, exploits the potential of diverse materials and their materiality. All the works presented are convincing in their subtlety and invite a view both from close up and from a distance.

 

The exhibition is part of the STRABAG Artlounge Special series, which presents long-standing artists from the STRABAG Artcollection. Andrea Bischof, Oliver Dorfer and Michael Kos are celebrating a milestone birthday this year and are represented with numerous works from many creative periods from the past three decades.

Details from works by Andrea Bischof, Michael Kos and Oliver Dorfer (f.l.t.r.)

Exhibitions

SoiL Thornton: Choosing Suitor

15/09/202312/11/2023

Vereinigung bildender KünstlerInnen Wiener Secession

Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien

SoiL Thornton’s work and persona resist categorization along preconceived notions of genre, medium, artistic subjectivity, biography, as well as gendered and racial identity. A 2012 Cooper Union graduate based in Brooklyn, New York, their work has since been exhibited widely and internationally. Until mid-2020 known by their given name Torey, they have been traversing boundaries between media such as painting and sculpture. In turn, their work expands to collage and installation, and they frequently act as a curator.

 

 

A steady play with language and meaning can be grasped in their work and exhibition titles, perhaps most strikingly in Painting (2017): Hung on the wall, this work consists of a large steel saw blade adorned with a series of found painted rocks. In their practice, they have been working against the grain of some of the art world’s conventions, from medium specificity to questions of branding and commodification. In so doing, they inquire into modes of circulation of works of art and how artist-personas accrue value. To the artist, renegotiating the limits of artistic media and conventions of presentation seem as crucial as unsettling expectations and conceptions of identity directed at individuals––above all, artists.

SoiL Thornton, Decomposition Evaluation, 2022, installation view, Kunstverein Bielefeld, photo: Fred Dott

Exhibitions

Mai Ling

15/09/202312/11/2023

Vereinigung bildender KünstlerInnen Wiener Secession

Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien

Founded in Vienna in 2019, Mai Ling is an artists’ collective and association dedicated to facilitating dialogues about experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and any kind of prejudgment, particularly against Asian FLINT* (women*, lesbian, inter*, non-binary, and trans*). Rooted in solidarity against patriarchal and racial discrimination, the group offers a protected space and growing network to give voice to the many individuals affected by such discrimination and foster new forms of collaboration. Encouraging and contextualizing contemporary Asian art and culture, Mai Ling employs a variety of artistic and discursive formats such as performances, texts, videos, sound, installations, talk series, interventions, and protests.

 

 

Mai Ling’s name refers to an eponymous television sketch from 1979 by the German comedian Gerhard Polt that showcases sexist and racial stereotypes and prejudices against Asian women* in German-speaking society. Drawing from this work and addressing present-day issues, Mai Ling challenges the Western patriarchal gaze and confronts racist fantasies that keep reproducing stereotypes about “Asia” and are still deeply embedded and internalized by society.

Mai Ling, Mai Ling Kocht 2: Eating as pleasure and protest, 2021, video still, © MAI LING

Exhibitions

Mykola Ridnyi

15/09/202312/11/2023

Vereinigung bildender KünstlerInnen Wiener Secession

Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien

Mykola Ridnyi is an artist, sculptor, filmmaker, essayist, and curator. His performances, installations, sculptures, and short films reflect the social and political realities of today’s Ukraine. Crossing media boundaries, his work ranges from early political actions in public settings to creations that meld site-specific installation, photography, and moving images. In his most recent films, he has experimented with techniques of nonlinear montage and collage on the intersection between the documentary and fictional registers. The power of the past over our present and future and the manipulation of historical memories motivated by contemporary political agendas are among his core themes.

 

 

Ridnyi is a founding member of SOSka, an artists’ collective that originated in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and coeditor of Prostory, an online magazine about art and society. His work has been shown in Ukraine and abroad, including at the Venice Biennale; the School of Kyiv—Kyiv Biennial; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; daad galerie, Berlin; Transmediale, Berlin; the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and Bonniers konsthall, Stockholm. He has won numerous fellowships, including from the Berlin Academy of Arts; Iaspis, Stockholm; and Gaude Polonia, Cracow. In Austria, Ridnyi was a fellow at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen for six months in 2021 and, most recently, an artist-in-residence at Q21, Vienna, in January 2022. The 2022 edition of Steirischer Herbst showcases a 2008 video created in response “to Russia’s unexpected assault on Georgia in 2008.” “This short war took place six years before the annexation of Crimea—and fourteen years before the all-out invasion of Ukraine. Today, it appears as a precise indication of the present war’s first appearance in the distance, transposed onto a summer idyll.”

Mykola Ridnyi, Lost Baggage, 2019, 12th Kaunas Biennial, photo: Remis Š?erbauskas

Exhibitions

ÉVA BODNÁR: Gyere, gyere

16/09/202318/11/2023

Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman

Seilerstätte 7, 1010 Wien

Éva Bodnár and Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman have a long history of working together. Already 42years ago (1981) the artist was presented for the first time in the gallery in Innsbruck.

 

Eva Bodnár draws and paints what she loves. The starting point of her work is her own current position, from which she seeks what is suitable to work with in that particular moment. She allows her tools – her eyes, hands, thoughts, and feelings – to flow freely in order to interrupt an unwanted thinking process during drawing or painting and perhaps find an answer:How can one paint without conscious thought?In the midst of her conscious processual unfolding, comprehensive considerations regarding effectiveness, one’s range of action, and abilities are at play. The central question of one’s own abilities, what one is able to do without artificial intervention, out of one’s own strength, without tricks and double bottoms, how much one can achieve alone and at what point it stagnates without other participants, accompanies the artist throughout her life.

 

Bodnár’s rich potpourri of experience as well as certainty in composition and technique allow her to act as a courageous tightrope walker of her own creation. Through diverse, sometimes given, sometimes self-imposed framework conditions, such as temporal or spatial limits, she permanently challenges herself in her self-discipline. This certain kind of stress in combination with the elaborated chance, whose use always requires good and clear decisions, ensures a strong presence resting in itself. In this sense, Bodnár administers herself a healthy dose of heartbeat, which is clearly visible in her works, which are bursting with power and liveliness.

Photo © Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman / kunst-dokumentation.com

Exhibitions

Hollein Calling: Architectural Dialogues

21/09/202312/02/2024

Architekturzentrum Wien

Museumsplatz 1 im MuseumsQuartier (Eingang Volkstheater), 1070 Wien

Hans Hollein, the only Austrian to win the Pritzker Prize and a self-proclaimed avantgardist in the 1960s, was a meticulous curator of his own work throughout his life. At the same time, however, the reception of his work was often overshadowed by his personality. The exhibition „Hollein Calling. Architectural Dialogues” explores the Hollein phenomenon from today’s perspective. A dialogue with the positions of a younger generation of architects launches a reappraisal that brings Hollein’s work back into the current discourse.

 

In the exhibition, groundbreaking projects by Hans Hollein meet new buildings and projects by 15 European architectural offices* whose work is currently shaping the discourse. Visitors can resonate with alternating poles of agreement and dissonance. The objects from Hollein—sketches, models, prototypes, and documents—are all from the extremely extensive Archive Hans Hollein (Az W and MAK), which has been undergoing processing at the Az W for several years. In the exhibition “Hollein Calling. Architectural Dialogues” there is a juxtaposition with selected exhibits from the younger architectural offices. The focus of the dialogue is to convey the working methods and processes involved. The curators consciously decided against a linear and project-related reading. Instead, large tables create fields of associations where the objects meet along the lines of related themes, methods, and interests. Slide projections provide insights into Hans Hollein’s extensive archive of images. Many of the sources of the images shown here publicly for the first time provide new insights and access to alternative strands of thought and unrealized concepts for a previously ‘unknown’ Hollein. Again in dialogue with this, largeformat photographs convey the positions taken by the European architectural offices.

Hans Hollein: Retti Candle Shop, Kohlmarkt 8-10, 1010 Vienna, 1964-1965, Working model. © Hans Hollein Archive, Az W and MAK, Vienna

Exhibitions

Louise Bourgeois: Persistent Antagonism

22/09/202328/01/2024

Unteres Belvedere

Rennweg 6, 1030 Wien

Discover Louise Bourgeois’s early paintings as part of the Belvedere’s three-hundred-year jubilee. In 2023 the Belvedere will dedicate a major solo exhibition to an artist who, like virtually no other, has shaped the art of today.

 

Presented in the Baroque galleries of the Lower Belvedere, Louise Bourgeois’s paintings from the 1940s will be placed in dialogue with a selection of sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints from all periods of her storied career. In an oeuvre which covered a wide range of formal and material experimentation, Bourgeois succeeded in expressing contradictory impulses and binary oppositions – figuration and abstraction, male and female, conscious and unconscious – within a single work. By the 1990s, she had won global renown for her artistic achievements, becoming famous for her monumental spider sculptures and room-sized Cells. But it was in her oil paintings made between 1938 and 1949 that the French-American artist first developed the formal vocabulary and defined the thematic concerns that she would continue to explore over the following six decades.

 

The exhibition represents the first time these paintings will be exhibited as a body of work in Europe, and it is the first major exhibition of Bourgeois’s work in Vienna in a generation.

Louise Bourgeois, ROOF SONG, 1947, Photo: Eeva Inkeri, © The Easton Foundation / Bildrecht, Vienna 2023

Exhibitions

Raphael: Gold & Silk

26/09/20234/01/2024

KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM WIEN

Maria-Theresien-Platz, 1010 Wien

In the autumn of 2023, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna showcases a medium that played a central role in the public celebrations of princely power and magnificence during the Renaissance: monumental tapestries.

 

The most exquisite products fashioned from delicate silks and precious metal threads were produced in Brussels, including the series of tapestries depicting the story of the Apostles, commissioned by Pope Leo X (1475-1521) for the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The cartoons, which led to a stylistic revolution in Flemish tapestry design, are by the celebrated Italian artist Raffaele Santi (1483-1520). Taking Raphael’s designs as a starting point, the exhibition explores the evolution of the art of tapestries in the sixteenth century, and presents a selection of masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s rich holdings of tapestries.

©Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

Exhibitions

Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims

5/10/202317/03/2024

Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz

Treitlstraße 2, 1040 Wien

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s first solo exhibition in Austria. It is centered around the presentation of a new work, coproduced by Kunsthalle Wien. The eponymous film is the latest part of a series called Elemental Cinema; each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four elements. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being.

 

Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s works undermine patterns of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident to us underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims turns the spotlight on the persistence, though in altered form, of this modern relation to the Earth in the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet regime.

Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, 2023, Filmstill, Courtesy the artists

Exhibitions

SYSTEMRELEVANT

5/10/202318/02/2024

Künstlerhaus Vereinigung

Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien

Based on the concept of “system-relevant culture”, which has been discussed in many ways in recent years, the first exhibition by the new artistic director Günther Oberhollenzer aims to stimulate reflection on the value of art for our society.

 

In this very personal show, Oberhollenzer presents artistic positions that consciously lay claim to social relevance in their works, but he also asks artists how they see their role, what topics they are currently discussing. SYSTEMRELEVANT also sees itself as a programmatic position-fixing: What role and task can art spaces like the Künstlerhaus assume in our present? What can the art-interested public expect from a contemporary art exhibition?

 

The house, supported by the artists, is an open place of artistic experimentation and socio-political dialogue. The exhibition wants to reflect this and give visibility to a diverse art, which is located in the middle of society and also deals with pressing issues of our time in a very low-threshold way.

 

SYSTEMRELEVANT is a self-conscious statement for art, art makers and art space, but it wants above all to ask questions, to provide a stimulus for discussion, not to provide answers or even to fall into a justification dynamic. Eighteen artistic positions are represented in the show, of seven of which new works will be created for the exhibition. In this way – also in the sense of sustainability – expensive transports are to be avoided as far as possible and instead artists in Austria are to be supported with project commissions.

Danielle Pamp, Diva in Quarantine, 2020

Exhibitions

MAX OPPENHEIMER: EXPRESSIONIST PIONEER

6/10/202325/02/2024

Leopold Museum

Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

Max Oppenheimer was an Expressionist pioneer. Born in 1885 in Vienna, he first studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and later at the Art Academy in Prague. He participated in the legendary exhibitions Kunstschau Wien 1908 and Internationale Kunstschau Wien 1909 where he became acquainted with numerous progressive artists of that time, among them Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), Egon Schiele (1890–1918) and Albert Paris Gütersloh (1887–1973). Egon Schiele, who was five years his junior, actively sought out the company of Oppenheimer from 1909. Their ensuing friendship lasted many years and manifested in a period of them working together in Schiele’s studio (in the winter of 1910/11) and in the reciprocal appreciation of their respective works. During this time, the two artists portrayed each other several times. While Oppenheimer and Kokoschka also started out as friends, increasing rivalries between the two protagonists of the Austrian avant-garde escalated into a veritable feud. Kokoschka accused Oppenheimer of plagiarism, and turned to his international network to spread his message and discredit Oppenheimer’s oeuvre.

 

When German troops invaded Austria in 1938, the artist was forced to flee and emigrate via Switzerland to the US, where he died lonely and penniless in 1954.

 

With this long-overdue, large-scale exhibition, the Leopold Museum intends to shed new light on the eminent and ground-breaking oeuvre of Max Oppenheimer, which has unjustly fallen into oblivion, and to explore the wealth of his works’ motifs. Furthermore, the presentation looks at the role of the artist and his networks through his contemporaries Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.

©Leopold Museum

Exhibitions

Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed: Vices and Virtues

17/10/202325/11/2023

Galerie Ernst Hilger

Dorotheergasse 5, 1010 Wien

Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed – Vices and Virtues

17 Oct – 25 Nov 2023

Galerie Ernst Hilger

Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed, Paper coffins, 2022

Exhibitions

KYIV BIENNIAL 2023 in Vienna

18/10/202314/01/2024

In view of the brutal Russian attack on Ukraine, a comprehensive biennial project in Kyiv long seemed deeply uncertain, if not impossible. But, with a cascade of openings – starting in Kyiv and Vienna in October 2023, finishing in Berlin in 2024 – the fifth Kyiv Biennial will take place. This Biennial edition is conceived as a European event, with dispersed exhibitions and public programs in a number of Ukrainian and EU cities, and realized in partnership with leading European institutions in the field of contemporary art.

Instead of abandoning the project and thus submitting to the logic of war that attacks everything civil, the 2023 Biennial draws upon its founding idea: that of being a multi-centric initiative in a European, interconnected and solidary form. Art institutions in Ukraine (in Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod) organize presentations and events in their endangered yet working infrastructures. Despite the late start of planning due to the war, museums and exhibition halls in Vienna (the main exhibition spot), Warsaw and Berlin, together with venues in other European cities, have freed up their spaces and platforms for exhibitions and events with Ukrainian and international artists as well as for discursive, performative and educational activities. Together, the institutions have formed a curatorial consortium to jointly create a conceptual framework within which they develop their respective Kyiv Biennial programs.

How can a country at war address political, social, cultural and societal issues? Today, the experience of artists and cultural workers in Ukraine is profoundly marked by war trauma, displacement, lack of access to basic resources and, in many cases, direct involvement in armed resistance or the experience of life under military occupation. This poses existential challenges for the future of art and cultural production in Ukraine. The upcoming Biennial aims at reintegrating the Ukrainian artistic community, divided and scattered throughout Europe by the war, in order to empower its actors to work and reflect collectively and together with international colleagues on cultural, social and environmental challenges Ukraine is currently facing and to imagine scenarios for an emancipatory future within a global context.

The Kyiv Biennial strategy, developed in the course of its four previous editions, merges artistic production, critical knowledge and social engagement in the times of emergency, where curatorship goes far beyond its contemporary meaning of an artistic and organizational practice and becomes resignified with its original sense of restoration, rehabilitation and relief, thus suggesting not a biennial, but a perennial long-run international project, a “Kyiv Perennial.”

Exhibitions

Narrating Violence. A comic exhibition

20/10/202331/12/2023

Sigmund Freud Museum

Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien

Violence needs to be shown and viewed with a critical eye – its traces on the body, in the psyche and in society demand attention and awareness. Psychoanalysis has been doing just this forever. The new special exhibition in the Sigmund Freud Museum focuses on the medium of comics. From October, it will showcase the variety of its methods and aesthetic alternatives in representing individual and collective experiences of violence. Illuminating for psychoanalysis, comics present the unfathomable and unpronounceable – and they can be useful in opening up new perspectives on such experiences, and thus in addressing traumata.

 

The special exhibition Narrating Violence. A Comic Exhibition addresses the potential of this medium to (re)learn to see violence, and covers sexualized violence, the Shoah, war, displacement and migration as well as adolescent experiences of violence.

©Sigmund Freud Museum

Exhibitions

WONG PING

25/10/202331/03/2024

MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst

Stubenring 5, 1010 Wien

In his animated films and installations, Hong Kong-based artist Wong Ping, born in 1984, stages absurd, often lewd narratives that speak to our deepest desires, fantasies, and suppressed feelings. The colorful and childlike aesthetic in Wong’s videos creates a light-hearted, humorous, and accessible approach to the protagonists’ deep psychological issues. Wong’s themes of social isolation and social failure are partly derived from his life in Hong Kong. His parables are razor-sharp in their criticism, pose existential questions, and with their disarming honesty on the borderline between shock and humor, force viewers to reconsider their internalized norms of decency.
The MAK will show the artist’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

©Wong Ping

Exhibitions

Games, Planes and Soft Opening. Serbian Art Now

8/11/202320/12/2023

Hilger Next

Opening: 7.11.2023 at 19:00

 

Vaccilating between soft and hard, ferocious and tender, Games, Planes and Soft Openings presents twelve unique and uncompromising voices of Serbian art, with an overview of their different poetics, politics and considerations of process.

 

Children’s guns in museum displays evoke irreversible imagery of schoolyard shootings (Miodrag Stajčić); ghosts of masculinity question structures of power, faith and success (Predrag Damjanović); signifiers of twentieth-century rolemodels (Uroš Djurić) hide in plain sight beside ambiguous and filmic scenes of intimacy (Marija Šević). Softly folded fabrics create vibrant tactile abstractions (Bosiljka Zirojević) or rhythmic landscapes (Ana Vrtačnik). Skin is cut, marked and put on display like a tailor’s dummy in a defiant reinvention of self-image and power (Marina Marković). The grids and planes of new abstractions hide music, movement and stillness (Nemanja Nikolić), ambiguous games (Aleksandar Dimitrijević), or poetic monumentality (Andrea Ivanović Jakšić). Ethereal spaces void of human presence (Miljan Stevanović) confront endlessly innovative thought-machines for public projections (Joskin Šiljan).

 

Encapsulating the challenges of contemporary living, with common threads connecting the disruptors and the weavers, this polyvalent mirror of alternate selves reflects love, angst and hope of contemporary life.

 

Curated by Alexandra Lazar and Hektor Peljak, produced by AUGS.ART for Galerie Ernst Hilger.

 

Artist list:

Predrag Damjanović, Aleksandar Dimitrijević, Uroš Djurić, Andrea Ivanović Jakšić, Marina Marković, Nemanja Nikolić, Marija Šević, Joskin Šiljan, Miodrag Stajčić, Miljan Stevanović, Ana Vrtačnik, Bosiljka Zirojević

Predrag Damjanović, Eat my Fear, 2020, courtesy STAB gallery

Opening

Opening: Monika Kus-Picco. Addictions

9/11/20239/11/2023

19:00—21:00

Galerie Lukas Feichtner

Seilerstätte 19, 1010 Wien

Monika Kus-Picco’s work explores expired products from the pharmaceutical industry to create vivid experiences with these substances and to explore the connections between social systems, gender, and regional-cultural differences in medicine. The artist’s exploration of disease and the extensive use of medications is rooted in her family history.

 

Works are intended to draw attention to the mass sale of brightly colored pills in the USA, as well as to a drug that sparked a second sexual revolution. In another cycle of works, attention is paid to the important gender medicine.

©Lukas Feichtner Galerie

Exhibitions

Monika Kus-Picco: Addictions

10/11/20239/12/2023

Galerie Lukas Feichtner

Seilerstätte 19, 1010 Wien

Monika Kus-Picco’s work explores expired products from the pharmaceutical industry to create vivid experiences with these substances and to explore the connections between social systems, gender, and regional-cultural differences in medicine. The artist’s exploration of disease and the extensive use of medications is rooted in her family history.

 

Works are intended to draw attention to the mass sale of brightly colored pills in the USA, as well as to a drug that sparked a second sexual revolution. In another cycle of works, attention is paid to the important gender medicine.

©Lukas Feichtner Galerie

Exhibitions

Special exhibition by Ariadne Randall: Meltiverse - Teil 1

10/11/202317/11/2023

Galerie Peter Gaugy

Goldschlagstrasse 106, 1150 Wien

In a special exhibition to be held in conjunction with Vienna Art Week, Vienna-based American artist, composer, and writer Ariadne Randall will present the inaugural part of her project titled, the “Meltiverse, Teil 1”.

 

“In a world made strange by human action, subjects struggle to cohere. Seas melt, art feeds AI. All that is solid melts into banks. We’re suspended in a hurricane with our dining table and chablis 10,000 meters in the air, telling stories of the ground.

 

Proposing that our poly-crisis is at heart a crisis of imagination, Ariadne Randall’s Meltiverse project de- and re-constructs the given using image, text, and sound. “Meltiverse – Teil 1” contains the first part of this research: video installations, drawings, wearables, 3D renders, excerpts from a novel, and modified instruments.

 

The works draw on her lived trans* experience, Jack Halberstam’s low theory, and the ever-presence of the archive. While men with goggle toys sell us our world but worse, the artist asks what stories of difference we might tell instead. What might a monster know that we could learn? What was your original face before your parents were born?”

Ariadne Randall, Meltiverse Teil 1

Exhibitions

Silent mail. The answer.

11/11/202317/11/2023

The interim use project WEST has been revitalizing the former WU in Vienna’s ninth district since March 2022, offering space for temporary studio rooms, studios, workshops, seminars, events, exhibitions, symposia and talks. In November, WEST will open its doors during Vienna Art Week and offer insights into the creative work of its interim users as part of the Open Studio Days 2023. Parallel to this, the exhibition Stille Post. Die Antwort.

 

The exhibition Stille Post. Die Antwort. , a continuation of the exhibition Stille Post, which took place within the framework of Foto Wien 2023, unites the diverse artistic positions of WEST under a curatorial principle inspired by the children’s game Stille Post. In this game, messages are passed from one person to the next in whispers. At WEST, too, information is passed from artist to artist, but unlike whispered words, these are nonverbal messages in the form of artistic works.

 

The exhibition focuses on the transfer of artistic knowledge. How can the knowledge generated through the artistic practices of artists be received and transferred into one’s own subjective knowledge? What information stored in the artwork can be passed on to the next artist and made tangible, and what information is lost? Which material-sensual as well as content-related layers of the artwork are reflected and how do they change during transmission? Which reception structures and patterns emerge? Thus, the exhibition positions itself at the interface of artistic production and reception and also shows the limits of translatability.

Exhibitions

Group exhibition: Silent mail. The answer.

11/11/202312/11/2023

The interim use project WEST has been revitalizing the former WU in Vienna’s ninth district since March 2022, offering space for temporary studio rooms, studios, workshops, seminars, events, exhibitions, symposia and talks. In November, WEST will open its doors during Vienna Art Week and offer insights into the creative work of its interim users as part of the Open Studio Days 2023. Parallel to this, the exhibition Stille Post. Die Antwort.

 

The exhibition Stille Post. Die Antwort. , a continuation of the exhibition Stille Post, which took place within the framework of Foto Wien 2023, unites the diverse artistic positions of WEST under a curatorial principle inspired by the children’s game Stille Post. In this game, messages are passed from one person to the next in whispers. At WEST, too, information is passed from artist to artist, but unlike whispered words, these are nonverbal messages in the form of artistic works.

 

The exhibition focuses on the transfer of artistic knowledge. How can the knowledge generated through the artistic practices of artists be received and transferred into one’s own subjective knowledge? What information stored in the artwork can be passed on to the next artist and made tangible, and what information is lost? Which material-sensual as well as content-related layers of the artwork are reflected and how do they change during transmission? Which reception structures and patterns emerge? Thus, the exhibition positions itself at the interface of artistic production and reception and also shows the limits of translatability.

Exhibitions

Darker, Lighter, Puffy, Flat

29/11/202314/04/2024

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier

Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

Curator: Laura Amann

 

Assistant Curator: Hannah Marynissen

 

Artists: Nina Beier • Lucia Dovičáková • VALIE EXPORT • Elisa Giardina Papa • Andrea Éva Györi • Trulee Hall • Monia Ben Hamouda • Šejla Kamerić & Aleksandra Vajd • Maria Lassnig • Claudia Lomoschitz • Tala Madani • Sarah Margnetti • Radha May • Marlie Mul • OMARA Mara Oláh • Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa • Laure Prouvost • Christina Ramberg • Adam Rzepecki • Toni Schmale • Maja Smrekar • Mariya Vasilyeva • Dorottya Vékony • Marianne Vlaschits • Rafał Zajko • …

 

The group exhibition Darker, Lighter, Puffy, Flat will feature works, including several new commissions, by international artists who reflect on the manifold meanings of breasts, not only in art history but in society and culture at large. The works inhabit a space of tensions created by the many contradictory – sometimes hypocritical – but also sensual and playful views on breasts.

 

Breasts – especially women’s – are in many ways omnipresent in our lives, in advertisements, movies, and casual references in all kinds of conversations. Nevertheless, the breast as well as the nipple continue to be objects of panic and censorship in the public and online domains. Their shape also suffers regular scrutiny, be it as a sexual fetish or ever-changing beauty standard. In many cases, breasts are a contradictory symbol of both virginal motherhood and of cheap erotica. Science also has a lot to say about the constitution and qualities of breasts, as can be seen in “breast physics” for video games or the possible changes effected in a child’s genetic material by breastfeeding. At times, breasts even provoke controversy in their absence, as in the brutal fate of St. Agatha or in heated discussions on top surgery in queer discourses. The list is endless, much like the various depictions of breasts themselves, making the breast a topic that is as sensually captivating as it is intellectually engaging.

 

Project supported by the Italian Council (2023), Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture

Monia Ben Hamouda, Gymnasium, 2020, courtesy the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin