The permanent exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien provides insights into the most extensive and comprehensive collection on Austrian architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the centre is the investigation of key exponents, including well-known and less well-known objects. Seven Hot Questions bring Cold Storage to life.

The Architekturzentrum Wien is the only museum in Austria devoted exclusively to architecture. As the Az W Collection has expanded over the last 17 years and consists of over 100 architects’ archives as well as extensive collections of individual projects, a large number of objects are being shown for the first time in the Permanent Exhibition: ‘Hot Questions — Cold Storage’. Selected models, drawings, furniture, fabrics, documents and films develop new threads in seven thematic episodes. Each episode is preceded by one of today’s burning issues, a Hot Question that brings Cold Storage to life.

The nation’s building activity with all of its cultural, social, economic and technical ramifications is made strikingly visible. The contents covered range from the special significance of Red Vienna to architectural pedagogical experiments in the wake of the 1968 movement or architectural revolts in Vorarlberg, to historical and current examples of environmental rethinking. The exhibition also engages with the ideological instrumentalisation of architecture and spatial planning and the active collaboration of architects in authoritarian systems, as well as their resistance. At the same time, the exhibition challenges deficits in the canon of Austrian architectural history, for instance from a perspective of gender equality. New players are featured, light is shed on previously little known sources and the key focus is on multiple perspectives instead of on a national historical narrative. This diversity is also reflected in the exhibition design. The sheer variety of the exponents and their display makes a visit to the exhibition a sensual and an atmospheric experience.

Concept: Angelika Fitz, Monika Platzer
Curator: Monika Platzer
Curatorial Assistance: Sonja Pisarik, Iris Ranzinger, Katrin Stingl
Production: Andreas Kurz
Finances und conversion: Karin Lux
Assistance: Barbara Kapsammer
Exhibition design: tracing spaces / Michael Hieslmair, Michael Zinganel ; seite zwei / Christoph Schörkhuber, Stefanie Wurnitsch

© Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung

The exhibition deals with the most inevitable part of every existence. Juxtaposing works of art that span a cultural-historical arc from the Middle Ages to the present, “Being Mortal” traces the deep meaning of death in individual as well as collective and socio-political contexts. The show focuses on intimate, personal approaches as well as the public, political role of dying and the process of facing death.

The extensive graphic works from the legendary Otto Mauer Collection that are also on display, present an opportunity for exciting insights into the collecting activities of this key figure of the Austrian art scene of the postwar period.

Curator: Johanna Schwanberg

Co-Curator: Klaus Speidel

Curatorial Assistant: Anke Wiedmann

Günter Brus, Young Death (Detail), 2020. Courtesy of the artist © Günter Brus, Photo: L. Deinhardstein

A project by KÖR. Address: Kendlerstraße 38A, 1160 Vienna.

From October 20, the façade of the Mistplatz in Ottakring will be dominated by street art and the question of sustainability: at the invitation of SOON Art Studio, the art collective founded in 2019 by Elisabeth and Rob Perez, eight artists will occupy approximately 200 square meters of the outdoor space of the Mistplatz Ottakring and establish it as a curated street art gallery in Vienna’s public space for one year. In addition to the artists El Jerrino, Golif, David Leitner, Lym Moreno, Video oner and Sckre and Nadine Werjant, the curators of the project under the name Deadbeat Hero and Rapunze will each design 6 x 4 meter wall sections with large-scale paintings.

With the goal of making urban art more accessible to people, SOON Art Studio designs and plans murals for indoor and outdoor spaces, curates exhibitions, networks artists, and organizes workshops for interested laypeople. For the Ottakringer Mistplatz, the thematic examination of environmental issues was an obvious choice, which became the content bracket for the project and with which the artists found an open ear at the city’s municipal department responsible for waste disposal (MA 48).

Photo: © Michael Reisenhofer, 2023

The exhibition focuses on the medal as an art object. The Kunstkammer and the Coin Cabinet provide the setting for this. Medals are above all collector’s items. They convey political messages or serve as awards for special achievements. Medals also commemorate a person or a special occasion, such as a marriage or an accession to the throne.

Medals were also produced at the courts of the Habsburg family over the centuries. The exhibition shows portraits of important family members from 1500 to the end of the monarchy in 1918 and takes visitors to the courts in Madrid, Prague, Vienna and Innsbruck. Many medallists were active there. Employment as a court artist brings many advantages and a high reputation. It is therefore highly coveted.

70 medals from 400 years are juxtaposed with works of sculpture and painting. The Prunk & Prägung exhibition follows artists who often work in several art forms. They produce medals, but are also architects, painters, sculptors or goldsmiths. The exhibition shows medals together with other works by the same artists. Their working methods changed over the centuries: In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, artists produced sculptures, paintings and similar works in addition to medals. In later times, they specialized entirely in medals.

Im Vordergrund Büste Kaiser Karls V. von Leone Leoni, um 1555 (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Kunstkammer); im Hintergrund Rückseite einer Medaille au

Efforts to expand and diversify museum collections are a logical consequence of today’s unconditional calls for equal rights and freedom of expression. The exhibition The Beauty of Diversity presents the rich depth and breadth of the ALBERTINA Museum’s contemporary collections while demonstrating the essential turn toward women and LGBTQIA+ artists, people of color, aboriginal artistic stances, and autodidacts, all of whose works stand out before the contrasting foil of the Old Masters.

Today’s art world is characterized by a deep interest in identity politics and its issues of class, race, and gender. The resulting broad spectrum of artistic, stylistic, and substantive approaches represents a necessary expansion of the historical canon that is represented at the ALBERTINA Museum by artists ranging from Michelangelo and Raphael to Dürer, Rembrandt, and Rubens and on to Goya, Schiele, Picasso, and Warhol.

In its various chapters, this spring exhibition at ALBERTINA MODERN develops an aesthetics of the diverse that upends the ideality of classicist stylistic and formal strivings as well as the conception of the human being as one-dimensional, preferring to instead pursue the beauty of the grotesque, impure, and repressed while lending visibility to that which is marginalized, downcast, and divergent from the norm.

The hybrid mixing and recombination of various systems and genders plays as prominent a role here as does the presentation of the marginalized. The inclusion of artists from Australia, Africa, Asia, and South America is a priority in this exhibition and serves to undermine the exclusive character of eurocentric thought and action as well as western art and culture.

Autodidacts exemplify a pronounced will to do what one must do, proving their authenticity in how they point out art’s internal necessity. Just as, individuals who probe and transcend boundaries not only call to mind art’s role as an anthropological constant but also—through their divergent modes of existence—exemplify nonconformist ways of living and working.

Sungi Mlengeya | Wallow, 2022 | Private collection, Courtesy of Afriart Gallery © Sungi Mlengeya

Living together with camels and their close relatives shapes cultures. It is a source of livelihood for people around the world and part of their cultural identity. In a special exhibition scheduled to begin in 2024, the Weltmuseum Wien will explore the many aspects of life with dromedaries, Bactrian camels, llamas, and alpacas and will examine the effect that these animals, broadly called camelids, have had on the societies of which they are part.

Featuring films, photographs, artworks, and artefacts from the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien, several of which will be on public view for the first time, and with numerous loans from other institutions, the exhibition in six galleries narrates encounters with camelids past, present, and future.

The exhibition’s thematic arc extends from the first camels, which evolved in North America, how they were domesticated, spread across the world, and are kept today as universal livestock that have contributed to human survival.

The opportunities afforded by the extensive use of products derived from camelids establish a bridge to the present and also point to the future: to address climate change, camelids have emerged as a bearer of hope in medicine, nutrition, and the textile industry.

The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2024 to be the International Year of the Camelid. The Weltmuseum Wien presents the exhibition On the Backs of Camels as part of Austria’s international commitment to the above initiatives.

Super Taus Super Taus and a Camel Yasha 2017 © Photography: Imam Guseinov

The duo show, JAZZ., presents Rene Matić (b.1997, Peterborough, UK) and Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) together for the first time. Both artists present existing works as well as new commissions made specifically in response to the space and the city of Vienna. Encompassing painterly gestures, installation, film, photography, and sound, each element on show is in dialogue, shaped by Murillo’s black canvas installation which is suspended from the ceiling throughout the space. Together, through dissection and reconciliation, both artists explore the impossibilities and contradictions that arise from notions of desire, visibility and opacity. In contrast to transparency, opacity simply accepts that everything that makes us us cannot be understood completely.

Coming from differing vantage points and mediums, both artists employ gesture and abstraction within their practices. Murillo chooses the social over the subjective and the collective over the individual, while Matić’s practice is often grounded in the personal. At the heart of Murillo’s work is gestural painting, reminiscent of action painting, akin to the use of dance in Matić’s videos, as they both share a spontaneous, unbothered and unscripted nature. Additionally, both artists succeed in carving out a space of independence for themselves in a cultural context that is determined to classify and smooth out everything and everyone. By creating room for discontinuous and new thinking they reformulate one’s (art-)historical narratives and genealogies.

The title JAZZ. evokes many resonances and qualities within each artist’s practice. It could be understood as a mode of artistic collaboration but also of reception: one where cultural sensibilities are blended, improvisation takes place, group interaction becomes as vital as the individual voice. JAZZ. nods to concepts of desire, of consumption of the Other, it plays with performativity while retaining the right to opacity.

Rene Matić, (out of) place 1, 2024, courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London, © Rene Matić

More and more people are travelling more frequently, further and for shorter. What is the impact of our holiday dreams on the built environment, the social fabric and climate change? And how can we envisage a kind of tourism that does not destroy what it lives from?

Tourism has been growing in intensity for decades, and become an integral part of our Western lifestyle. It has created added value, prosperity and cosmopolitanism to even the most remote regions, thus preventing emigration. That is the sunny side of tourism. On the downside, there are negative effects, such as crowds of people, the impact on the environment, and rising land prices.

Tourist hotspots suffer from the onslaught of visitors while other places are left behind. Communities are ambivalent: On the one hand they benefit from tourism, while on the other they are increasingly observing undesirable side effects. And considering that tourism is more dependent on the climate than other sectors of the economy, it is astonishing that climate change is often still a marginal issue here, of all places. Using vivid illustrations, examples and data, the exhibition shows, among other things, the interplay between tourism and economic growth, rising CO2 emissions and the displacement of local populations by pushing up living costs and the price of housing — now that tourist accommodation is increasingly becoming investment properties.

How can we rethink tourism in an era of climate crisis, wars, the threat of further pandemics, a shortage of skilled labour and an ongoing energy crisis, and steer it in a more sustainable direction? What is the role that spatial planning and architecture are playing in this? The exhibition sheds light on key aspects of tourism, such as mobility, city tourism, interdependencies with agriculture, climate change, the privatisation of natural beauty and the change in accomodation typologies, and explores the question of whether and how tourism development is planned. Above all, however, the exhibition looks at the potential for transformation. Many travellers are reluctant to see themselves as part of the phenomenon of mass tourism, and doubts about the climate compatibility of our travel patterns are being raised increasingly.

A large number of initiatives have recently emerged that take a different approach to nature, the local population, the climate, cities and villages, or on mobility. Local and international examples present pioneering solutions. Numerous successful examples stimulate the appetite for a type of holiday that is no longer exclusively based on consumption and the growth paradigm. The key question remains: How can we envisage tourism that no longer destroys what it lives from?

© Schule der Alm, Vals

The first institutional solo exhibition featuring the art of Tamuna Sirbiladze (1971–2016) will encompass painting, drawing, and installation. Born in Tbilisi, Sirbiladze developed her signature style in Vienna, distinguished by its highly expressive approach and anthropomorphic visual language.

Recurring themes in Sirbiladze’s paintings include the human body, sexuality, and vulnerability, which she initially captured in a boldly figurative manner using a consummate formal vocabulary before increasingly turning to abstraction. Already at an early stage, an unsparing, sometimes even graphic, quality emerged in the depictions of these subjects, all the while incorporating the artist’s self-scrutiny (and self-questioning). Her work also demonstrates an intensive engagement with the canon of art and painting, expressed in the meticulous study of iconic works by the Old Masters. Sirbiladze interprets these examples from art history with a sharp eye and a fine, painterly feel. By subjectively accentuating certain attributes, she challenges the connotations of the male image in art history. References to artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Martin Kippenberger run like a thread through her oeuvre, as do religious images including the recurring motif of the pomegranate: Georgia’s national fruit and a Christian symbol of fertility.

Not Cool but Compelling is the pithy title of a large abstract work from 2011 executed in oil crayon on canvas. It succinctly describes Tamuna Sirbiladze’s enduring concern, namely to give compelling form to her concept of art without being bound by the aesthetic conventions of her time.

Curated by Sergey Harutoonian.
Assistant Curator: Vasilena Stoyanova

Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna © Tamuna Sirbiladze

In association with Klima Biennale Wien, KUNST HAUS WIEN presents a comprehensive group exhibition on one of the world’s most vital ecosystems: the forest. Sixteen contemporary artistic positions reflect on the forest as a habitat, its ecological processes, as well as the threats it faces.

More than ever, the world’s forests have become monuments to the imbalances found on our planet. Forests filter water and air, and supply resources and food. As habitats for the majority of terrestrial animals, forests are beneficial to human health, and, as vital carbon stores, help stabilize the planet’s climate. Logging and the profit-oriented exploitation of woodlands are accelerating the ecological crisis while climate change fuels deforestation.

Artistic perspectives on various forest regions of the world—from the Amazon rainforest, to the Embobut Forest in Kenya, to the primeval forests of the Carpathians, to the Swiss pine forests, and to local woodlands—address pressing issues surrounding this sensitive ecosystem. On the one hand, the works in the exhibition engage with human influence on the condition and destruction of forests, and, on the other hand, with the collective and symbiotic nature of the forest ecosystem. Into the Woods speaks to reckless deforestation, the effects of forest monocultures, the tensions that exists between economic forest use and sustainable conservation, the financialization of the climate crisis, the threat to woodlands due to global warming, as well as the ecological processes and complex interrelations at the core of the forest ecosystem.

The artists in the exhibition bring to light the pivotal role that forests play for the health and stability of our planet. Research-based, enlightening, and poetic works—some of which were developed in cooperation with scientists—make this complex topic feel tangible, and offer new perspectives on an ecosystem that is seemingly all too familiar.

© Museu de Arte Indígena, Curitiba

The STRABAG Kunstforum is pleased to invite you to the award ceremony and exhibition opening of the five winners of the STRABAG Artaward International 2024.

Alexandre Diop
Tina Dobrajc
Eva Gentner
Andrey Klassen
Nana Mandl

Opening
17.06.2024, 18-21h

The first prize and the four recognitions will be awarded on 27.6.2024 by Klemens Haselsteiner, CEO STRABAG SE, Sebastian Haselsteiner, Head of STRABAG Kunstorum, and Alenka Gregorič, Artistic Director Cukrarna, Ljubljana and jury member STRABAG Artaward International, in the Gironcoli-Kristall in the STRABAG Building in Vienna.

The STRABAG Artaward International is awarded as a promotional prize for young art in the fields of painting and drawing. From 2024-2026, the prize will be awarded to artists in Germany, Slovenia and Austria.
At the beginning of the year, 852 artists applied, 50 positions prevailed in the Online-Jury. On April 11, the Jury Meeting of the international expert jury took place in front of the original works. The works of the five prize winners will be presented in the exhibition.

Award winners f.l.t.r.: Tina Dobrajc, Eva Gentner, Alexandre Diop, Nana Mandl, Andrey Klassen (details)