Lebt und arbeitet in Wien: Contemporary Art from Vienna
Brishty Alam
Kleiner Brauners on Display, 2026
Wood, sweatshirts
Courtesy the artist
Brishty Alam (b. 1988, London, United Kingdom) moves fluidly between sculpture, performance and social exchange, producing works that playfully navigate diasporic experience or what she describes as ‘slippages’ between ‘models’ and ‘cultural, political or economic processes’. Her ‘wearables’ are works that circulate through communities and environments, foregrounding questions of identity, belonging and visibility. Printed on the sweatshirts is the term Kleiner Brauner, which plays on the Viennese name for an espresso with a dash of milk. The artist explains: ‘As I was learning German, I realised that “ein Kleiner Brauner” means ‘a little brown one’ … like me … and wanted to have a jumper with that on it. Celebrating Brownness, something I struggled with growing up. And also, in a space like Vienna. Then I thought maybe more people would want one too.’ Distributed, worn or shared among friends and a wider network, the work operates as both a subtle code and a collective gesture of recognition and solidarity. Here the sweatshirts are presented on furniture that refers both to the dark wood interiors of Viennese coffeehouses and the domestic clothing racks, known as alna, used for garments in the Indian subcontinent.
Diana Barbosa Gil
lebt und arbeitet in Wien, 2026
Wood, ceramic, glass, foam, latex
Courtesy the artist
Diana Barbosa Gil (b. 1990, Cali, Colombia) works across sculpture, video, performance and text, creating installations that combine personal experience with broader social and political questions. Her practice is rooted in assemblage and humour, both as a method and as a way of understanding the world. Gil’s works often draw on her own biography, addressing themes of precarity and belonging. The artist is interested in challenging hierarchies – between materials, disciplines and cultural narratives – while questioning ideas of authorship and authenticity. For this exhibition, Gil has created a sculpture that takes the form of a lifeguard’s chair. For the artist, the seemingly functional seating element symbolises a display of hierarchy, while at the same time serving as a support for one of her ceramic sculptures. Within this constructed setting, forms of animal life are staged and set to work: a mussel-encrusted vase and a beehive – inhabited by a single bee – establish a speculative framework.
Anna-Sophie Berger
Gum Not God, 2025
Teak, 2025
A Complete Woman, 2025
Aluminium, polyester, thread, screws
Courtesy the artist & Layr, Vienna
Anna-Sophie Berger (b. 1989, Vienna, Austria) works across sculpture, installation, photography and video, using textiles and found materials to explore the relationship between bodies, objects, history and systems of display. Berger’s sculptures combine references to clothing worn by clients of her family’s business in the 1960s with extensive research that the artist made on the Lithuanian Artist Union’s archive of Soviet design. Gum Not God (2025), Teak (2025) and A Complete Woman (2025) consist of modular sculptures in diverse fabrics in rectangular and cylindrical form.
Henning Bohl
Die Gabe, 2025
Installation comprising various works:
Abgeschnittenes/über den Giebeln/zu den drei Sonnen, 2025; Künstlerïnnenfigur iii, 2020; Grab, 2025; An der Grenze zum Gleichen, 2021; An der Grenze, 2025; Die Gabe, 2023–2026; Beigaben, 2023–2026
Reverse glass painting, clip frame, MDF support, fabric, cheeseboxes, gloves, wood, balusters, wire, ribbon, foam isolation, spraypaint, foam supports
Courtesy the artist
Henning Bohl (b. 1975, Oldenburg, Germany) makes paintings, installations and objects, developing a practice that resists fixed categorisation. Rather than adhering to a single medium, Bohl’s work is characterised by expansive compositions that translate the language of a painting, treating disparate materials and formats as part of an extended pictorial field within space. Bohl’s works often emerge through an ongoing process of self-reflection, quotation and dialogue, in which questions of authorship and artistic production remain deliberately unresolved.
Central to their practice is an engagement with the histories and conventions of painting, which are both referenced and destabilised. Elements drawn from modernist traditions, alongside motifs from everyday and popular culture, are recombined into works that oscillate between aesthetic registers and ambitions.
Ramesch Daha
WIEN 1933 – 1935, 2026
Kunsthalle Wien Vitrine
Blueprint on transparent film
Courtesy the artist
Ramesch Daha (b. 1971, Tehran, Iran) has developed a new work for Kunsthalle Wien’s vitrine: WIEN 1933 – 1935 (2026). For this piece, the space functions as a lightbox for an extensive work that focuses on the Februarkämpfe [February Uprisings], the uprisings that took place in Vienna in February 1934. The violent clashes between factions of the ‘Republikanischer Schutzbund’, the banned paramilitary arm of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, and the authoritarian right-wing government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, marked a decisive moment in Austria’s political history, weakening resistance to the subsequent rise of National Socialism.
Daha’s practice investigates marginalised or overlooked historical narratives, often drawing on archival material such as maps, official documents and personal testimonies. In this work, she incorporates diary entries from Fritz Habeck, a 17-year-old resident of the Karl-Marx-Hof – one of the main centres of the Februarkämpfe – and the future chancellor Bruno Kreisky, alongside newspaper articles, maps and official records from the years 1933 to 1935. Each document is traced by hand onto paper, a physical gesture intended to confront history and consciously reckon with the past. The drawings are subsequently scanned, tinted and transferred to transparent film to make the images for the lightbox.
The work challenges conventional historical narratives, highlighting what is typically excluded or forgotten and emphasising the human story behind abstract data. Through this approach, events are rendered visible as both historical fact and lived experience, continuing Daha’s engagement with memory, documentation and the translation of archival material into contemporary art
The artist wishes to thank Univ.-Prof. i.R. Mag. Dr. Oliver Rathkolb, Bruno Kreisky Archiv, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wiener Zeitung
Judith Eisler
Brooklyn Bridge, 2026
Electric Cat, 2010
Oil on canvas
Malina, 2026
Gunther and Harry 2, 2026
Graphite on paper
Courtesy the artist Charim Galerie, Vienna; Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York & theStable, S-Chanf
Judith Eisler’s (b. 1962, Newark, United States) subjects are second-hand. Rather than painting from real life, she paints images taken from film stills that are composed by a director or cinematographer. Their apparent spontaneity is thus artfully constructed, story-boarded, rehearsed, selected from multiple takes and perfected in the editing room. The artist sifts through films, viewing countless frames to find ones that arrest her attention for different reasons. For this exhibition, Eisler has produced three new paintings. Brooklyn Bridge (2026) quotes from the 1983 film Variety, Gunther and Harry 2 (2026) from the 1970 film Götter der Pest and finally, Malina (2026) is taken from a 1991 film adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel. The scenes prompt questions about what the subjects or we are looking at. For example, the serene scene of the Brooklyn Bridge is punctured by moments of motion while, in another image, two men stand outside of a supermarket at night in a scene that is both intimate and mysterious. Enigmatic in their subject matter, Eisler uses the medium of painting to suffuse the works with an intense psychology. This is heightened by the fact that she has painted the images from a still on a computer screen.
Scott Clifford Evans
Davis County General Hospital Waiting Room, 2026
Clock, poster, glass coffee table, stage wall, various artworks: Anna Jermolaewa: Employee portraits, 2025, 24 framed photographs; Alexandra Kahl: It’s Okay 2, 2025, digital print on fabric; Edgar Lessig, I thought I wanted to be there, but I wasn’t sure (Chairs), 2021/2026, chairs, plastic and Jolanda Rendl: Lake Blanche, 2025, acrylic paint on wood
Night Shift, 2026
Video projection, sound, 118 min
Cinema chairs, posters, hospital scrubs, surgical tools, tongue depressors, enema kits, IV stand, syringe, various artworks: Stefan Brandmayr, Shlik-shlok, 2025, latex, metal wire, plaster; Chris Janka, Oszillotator (part of: Stereobild), 2016, monitor; Alexandra Kahl, It’s Okay 1, 2025, digital print on fabric; Jan Weiler, Head 1 (Pizza Guy), 2025, modelling material, styrofoam
The film is played in a loop.
It starts every two hours at 10:00, 12:00, 14:00, 16:00 (and 18:00 on Thursdays)
Courtesy the artist
Night Shift (2026) by Scott Clifford Evans (b. 1979, Salt Lake City, United States) is a featurelength film and installation that takes the form of a pilot episode for a medical drama. Set over the course of a single night on 22 December 1990 in Davis County, Utah, the work follows a series of escalating emergencies inside a hospital. From a woman in labour to a patient who reports supernatural encounters and the rising tensions among the medical staff, the drama unfolds while a blizzard develops outside.
Evans’s irreverent practice draws on the visual language and narrative structures of mainstream film and television, particularly genres such as trash, horror, thriller and drama. Working with limited resources, he develops his projects through collaborative and process-based methods, employing improvisation and enlisting the participation of – in this case – numerous artists and colleagues from Vienna as performers. In Night Shift, these strategies are combined with references to US television series such as ER (1994–2009) and The Pitt (2025–ongoing), while subtle details and casting choices reflect the artist’s long-term base in the city.
Philipp Fleischmann
Film Sculpture (3), 2022
16mm film, aluminium, polyoxymethylene
Courtesy the artist
Philipp Fleischmann (b. 1985, Hollabrunn, Austria) works with analogue film to create sculptural installations in which image, apparatus and space are inseparable. His works foreground the physical presence of cinema: the sound of projectors, the movement of film through reels and the clicks of mechanical parts become as important as the projected image itself, transforming exhibition spaces into cinematic settings. Referred to by the artist as ‘film sculptures’, these installations are self-contained systems where projectors, aluminium supports and screens form spatial configurations through which 16mm film visibly travels, sometimes appearing as luminous, abstract fields of colour. Embracing the theory of ‘Queer Abstraction’, which combines abstract art and queer theory to refuse clarity, stability and rigid definition, his work resists the idea of film as a fixed record of reality, presenting it instead as a perceptual experience in which the material performs its fluidity in continuous movements.
Parastu Gharabaghi
Orbit, 2026
Steel, solar panels, foils, lights, magnets, 9v batteries, textiles, wood flooring
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of Kunsthalle Wien Club
Parastu Gharabaghi (b. 1987, Vienna, Austria) creates immersive installations that evoke fictional, liminal environments – spaces that feel at once familiar and indeterminate. Her works often resemble social settings such as hostels or informal gathering places, populated with musical instruments, furniture, textiles and artworks. Yet these are not functional replicas; instead, they operate as carefully composed atmospheres in which different spatial and emotional registers overlap.
Orbit (2026) is a new sculpture with an elongated form evoking the so-called pencil towers, or narrow skyscrapers that punctuate many city skylines. Covered with textiles, foils and LED lights, its reflective surface folds past and future into one another, carrying both aspiration and imperfection. Low-tech materials and high-tech aesthetics intersect in a work that brings a cyberpunk sensibility and painterly approach to abstract sculpture.
Birke Gorm
sit-up and composure, 2024 – fortlaufend
Jute, wastepaper, metal scraps
Courtesy the artist & Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Birke Gorm (b. 1986, Hamburg, Germany) works with found and discarded materials, focusing on the social, economic and gendered histories embedded within them. Her sculptures often incorporate jute, burlap, wood and metal, materials that are associated with agricultural or industrial processes, approaching them not as neutral matter but as carriers of accumulated experience.
The works from the sit-up and composure (2024–ongoing) series translate these into sculptural forms that oscillate between object and body; abandonment and laziness. Cut, stitched and reassembled, the jute retains traces of its previous function within global trade. Gorm treats these surfaces as a kind of material script, where seams, patches and signs of wear register labour; gestures of handling and dispatch, repair and endurance. Rather than restoring the material, her interventions resemble acts of rewriting.
Jojo Gronostay
Untitled, 2026
Untitled, 2026
Untitled, 2026
Untitled, 2026
Acrylic and tape on canvas
Structure 01, 2026
Structure 02, 2026
Metal clothing stands, acrylic on paper
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna
Jojo Gronostay’s (b. 1988, Hamburg, Germany) fashion label Dead White Men’s Clothes (DWMC) functions as both artwork and experiment. The artist’s materials are deliberately hybrid. Altered second-hand garments, scanned and reprinted textiles and repurposed found items all function as both residue and active agents, carrying histories from their previous use and the street markets where the artist sourced them into the exhibition space, a journey that, in these works, can be traced at least from Accra to Vienna. This hybridity informs not only how things operate but also how they are presented and perceived. In Untitled (2026), Gronostay uses recycled silkscreen prints from his fashion label to make new works for the exhibition. Painting functions as upcycling to brand art as the upcycling industry par excellence. Structure 01 and Structure 02 (both 2026) repurpose clothing stands as sculpture, the recycled object being both material and method, tracing the actual movements of value and desire between continents.
Benjamin Hirte
Headquarters, 2026
Carrara marble, plaster
Donor, 2026
Carrara marble, lacquer
Courtesy the artist & Layr, Vienna
Benjamin Hirte (b. 1980, Aschaffenburg, Germany) works primarily in sculpture, exploring how forms migrate between bodies, object and architectural elements. His practice examines the ways in which art and utility overlap, revealing how sculptural languages borrow from both art history and everyday material culture.
Working predominantly in stone, Hirte combines digital drafting with analogue carving techniques. His sculptures are characterised by a tension between ubiquitous digital processes and their uncanny artificiality with the specific and unexpected qualities of ‘real’ materials. References from art history – ranging from Renaissance drapery to the fragmented figures of modernist sculpture – intersect with forms drawn from industrial design and digital aesthetics. According to Hirte, the resultant sculptures appear like dystopian ‘archaeological relics of a speculative future’.
Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler
Rätsel(haft), 1998
Powder-coated steel tubing, photograph
Courtesy the artists & Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
Since the early 1990s Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler (both b. 1964, Vienna, Austria) have developed a collaborative practice that rethinks authorship, participation and the conditions under which art is produced and experienced. Working with diverse social groups – including children, prisoners, psychiatric patients and people with disabilities – they create projects grounded in dialogue and shared decision-making. These works often unfold in unconventional settings and are shaped by a principle of “multiple authorship,” in which all participants contribute to the artistic process – which sometimes produces objects that do not resemble artworks. The artists allow form to emerge collectively, emphasising process over fixed results. Rätsel(haft) (1998) is a modular work with a title that plays with the German words for puzzle (Rätsel), imprisonment (Haft) and mysterious (rätselhaft). The work invites us to solve a riddle, implying the work’s completion not as a fixed resolution but as something that remains suspended in ambiguity.
Emma Hummerhielm Carlén
Cast 1 & 2, 2025/2026
Plaster
Doors ajar, 2025/2026
Drywall, wall paint, inkjet print, plaster
Courtsey the artist
The sculptural practice of Emma Hummerhielm Carlén (b. 1991, Stockholm, Sweden) is concerned with taking a position on art history and postmodern strategies. Doors ajar (2025/2026) is a series of sculptures that underscores the artist’s interest in the architecture of exhibition spaces. Using cast plaster and dry-wall plaster board, she replicated the corners of a room. On some of these pillar-like structures she then applied photographs depicting doors on corporate buildings, creating a hybrid between an architectural object and a picture of something else. The images show various states of doors being opened and closed depending on the angle from which the sculpture is viewed. The works are conceived to frame, direct and shift perception resembling thresholds or portals within the space.
Iman Issa
Two Women, 2024
Lacquered metal, text panel under glass
Scientist, 2024
Lacquered metal, silicone, acrylic, text panel under glass
Courtesy the artist; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna
Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo, Egypt) works across sculpture, text, sound and installation to explore how meaning is constructed and communicated. Her practice typically begins with existing objects, sites or historical references, which she reinterprets through reduced geometric forms. Her meticulously staged images and installations often consist of interrelated elements that subvert conventional associations.
The sculptures Two Women (2024) and Scientist (2024) are part of the series Doubles: Photograph – (Un)Like (M)Any Other(s) (2024), in which Issa examines how perception is shaped by language and social context. What might first appear as sculpture is framed instead as a ‘display’, resisting fixed categorisation and prompting a reconsideration of how objects signify. In this series, each display revolves around two photographs from different geographies and time periods (one of which is always attributed to the year of production) that share the same title. Although the displays themselves are not photographs per se, they revolve around photography in its many facets, treating it as a way of thinking and a manner of approaching the world as opposed to a technique attached to the device of a camera. Moreover, all of the displays deal with a kind of photography that records places, times, peoples and things that may appear generic. It may seem that the referents could be related to any place, any time, any peoples or any things, but they are in fact related to very specific places, very specific times, very specific peoples and things.
Ernst Yohji Jaeger
Nigredo, 2023
Rebis / 彼岸花, 2026
Oil on canvas
Untitled (moonwort), 2022
Distemper, oil, oil stick on canvas
Courtesy the artist & Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Ernst Yohji Jaeger (b. 1990, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) starts his paintings with the process of applying, building up and sanding away layers of paint. He continues this until something emerges on the canvas that demands to be formulated. Although he initiates the process, his practice strives to relinquish as much control as possible over the eventual image. He is less interested in formulating or executing a predetermined idea, concept or message, and more in the challenge of letting go of what is familiar, conscious or learned. The layers of colour that have accumulated beneath the painting’s surface through his preparatory process give the image its foundation. Upon this ground appear architectural elements, figures, plants, shadows, various objects and motifs that he carefully pulls from his observations of everyday life.
Lukas Kaufmann
Untitled, 2026
Wood, digital print on paper, jute, lacquer, brass
Untitled, 2026
Cardboard, digital print on paper, jute, lacquer, tin
Untitled, 2026
Untitled, 2026
Wood, lacquer, brass pigment, jute
Untitled, 2026
Wrought iron, sheet metal, fibre cement, jute, wood, laquer, silk, felt, velvet, photography
Courtesy the artist & Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Lukas Kaufmann (b. 1993, Klagenfurt, Austria) works across photography, drawing and sculpture, exploring the relationship between intimacy and representation. The artist often begins with a portrait, using his own body or others as a model. Grids function within his work as both structuring devices and points of friction: they organise the image while simultaneously expos-ing its limits, allowing moments of vulnerability, ambiguity and transformation to emerge.
This interplay extends to his sculptural works, where domestic forms and ornamental surfaces – covered in printed paper and photographs, textiles or lacquer – echo bodily proportions. The wall pieces displayed on the ground floor at Kunsthalle Wien – two of them covered in jute, the others with the artist’s photographs – are intended to resemble the proportions of a torso. Kaufmann extends this connection to the human body with a collar, which he includes in a green sculpture presented here on the first floor. The act of covering thus becomes an expression of care and intimacy.
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
Rub. Rock. Earth. Throat Clearing, 2025
Video, sound 6 min
Courtesy the artist
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (b. 1980, Vienna, Austria) works in video, photography, text and installation to examine the gaps and silences within public archives and dominant historical narratives. Grounded in Black feminist theory, postcolonial thought and anti-racist practice, her work engages with the fragmentary traces of Black lives and experience as collected, conserved and presented in museums, libraries and institutional collections. Rather than attempting to complete these histories, Kazeem-Kamiński focuses on what is omitted, citing absences as sites of possibility for entering into a dialogue with those whose presence is only partially recorded or entirely denied. Rub. Rock. Earth. Throat Clearing (2025) refers to the story of three children – Asue*, Gambra* and Schiama* – who were abducted from Sudan and brought to Europe in 1855 where they were entered into an Ursuline convent in Bruneck. The video shows two bodies circling each other in a tense and physical exchange as an embodiment of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, accompanied by a soundtrack narrated by the artist. The video is conceived as a throat-clearing (after a concept by Tina Campt): a pause, a breath, an opening for what is spoken and what remains unsaid.
Bouchra Khalili
The Constellations Series, 2011
Silk screen prints on paper
Courtesy the artist & mor charpentier, Paris/Bogota
The Constellations Series (2011) by Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975, Casablanca, Morocco) is a series of silkscreen prints that forms the closing chapter of The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011), an extensive body of work charting Mediterranean migration routes. Working with refugees and stateless individuals from North and East Africa, South and West Asia, Khalili devised a collaborative method of storytelling with people that were often without formal citizenship.
Rather than casting participants, the artist spent extended periods listening to exiled people so that they could determine how their stories would be told. Subjects traced their routes on a map with a marker pen, recounting journeys that often span years and involve complex and perilous crossings.
The Constellations Series translates these accounts into eight silkscreen prints. The routes, originally mapped with marker pen, are here depicted as constellations of stars, recalling ancient astronomy in which patterns in the night sky were interpreted through myth and storytelling. By transforming individual migration routes into celestial diagrams, Khalili elevates these journeys from the margins of contemporary politics to a celestial map. The images invite us to imagine forms of belonging that extend beyond national borders.
Ludwig Kittinger
Charlie, 2024
Toni, 2026
Perforated brick
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of Kunsthalle Wien Club
Ludwig Kittinger (b. 1977, Graz, Austria) develops sculptures that reflect a deep involvement with material and technique and their relationship to space. His practice often explores the tensions between organic and industrial materials, as well as the interplay between function and sculptural form. Each element in his work retains its material specificity while contributing to a cohesive composition, inviting viewers to face unexpected forms and moments of absurdity.
Kittinger’s new sculptures Charlie (2026) and Toni (2026) continue his engagement with brick as both an inexpensive building material and an exquisite sculptural medium. Kittinger treats the brick as a modular unit capable of conveying multiple associations – from modern engineering and structural construction to the archaeological remains of ancient structures. Kittinger’s organic forms, sculpted from a geometric material, coupled with their titles and grouping within the space, give the works an anthropomorphic appearance.
Jakob Lena Knebl
Kirstin, 2025
Kerstin, 2025
Cotton, ceramic, leather, wood, steel
Some Orange, 2025
Wool, polyester, wood
Courtesy the artist & Galerie MEYER*KAINER, Vienna
Jakob Lena Knebl (b. 1970, Baden, Austria) produces sculpture, installation, photography and design, creating immersive environments that disrupt and transgress the boundaries between art, fashion, architecture and other aspects of everyday life. Her irreverent practice dismantles hierarchies, referring variously to popular culture, design history, consumer culture and art history, using them to question how aesthetic forms shape our perceptions and identities. By employing objects and images that bear associations with the private or domestic sphere, Knebl creates hybrid settings that invite us to reflect upon our relationship with objects and bodies. Here a recent series of ‘soft sculptures’, Kirstin and Kerstin (both 2025), is presented together with the tapestry work Some Orange (2025). The ceramic faces on the two sculptures recall the design of Bjorn Wijnblad, an example of the hybrid nature of Knebl’s work, which simultaneously reflects different periods of art and design.
Sebastian Koeck
The haunted city (seven wire mesh carts), 2026
Salvaged wire mesh cart, various materials
Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Koeck’s (b. 1990, Innsbruck, Austria) practice parallels the architectural concept ‘as found’. A term coined in the 1950s by brutalist architects working in Britain it was used to describe a new, ‘aformal’ approach to design that embraced the ordinary, existing environment, and the beauty of everyday, functional, unrefined objects. Koeck is similarly interested in historically-charged materials, in the gaps and the anonymous aesthetics of interstitial spaces and objects. The haunted city (seven wire mesh carts) (2026) is a series of sculptures that takes the form of carts parked at the threshold of the exhibition at both sites. The titles of the works suggest things that they may have once carried, for example; Flower cart (1997/2006/ 2026), Water trolley (1997/2026) or Laundry cart (2026).
James Lewis
Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness (Retrieve), 2026
Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness (Reassemble), 2026
Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness (Recover), 2026
Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness (Reclaim), 2026
Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness (Reconstruct), 2026
Wood, plaster bandage, concrete, steel
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna
James Lewis (b. 1986, London, United Kingdom) works with language, data and sculptural form to explore the limits of description and the gap between systems of measurement and lived experience. He creates installations and sculptures that are at once austere and deeply affective. Influenced by sun-flower fields on the outskirts of Vienna, five sculptures from the series Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness (2026), refer both to art history and botany, drawing a connection between the extraction of plants and the history of colonialism. Coated in concrete, with their heads bending towards the floor, the flowers appear lifeless and sit under an artificial light source. Lewis refers to processes of extraction and environmental disruption, creating an image of ecological rupture while also signalling hope with a title that emphasises the power of solidarity in their collective existence and thus the possibility of change.
Angelika Loderer
Adrian, 2026
Steel, sand
Courtesy the artist & SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna
Angelika Loderer (b. 1984, Feldbach, Austria) works with sculpture to examine processes of formation, transformation and material hierarchy. Her work frequently engages with ecological and social structures, highlighting cycles of growth, decay and reuse. As such, it invites reflection on how natural and humanmade systems are interconnected and continuously reshaped. Central to her practice is the use of quartz sand, a material typically employed in casting procedures. By layering and shaping sand into temporary forms, Loderer exposes the hidden stages of sculptural production, drawing attention to the relationship between control and chance. Expanding on the concept of finding balance, the sculpture Adrian (2026) takes the form of a suspended metal mobile that holds quantities of sand in equilibrium.
Irina Lotarevich
Fortunes, 2026
Stainless steel
Volatility III, 2026
Optimism, 2025
Steel, patina, cast aluminium
Courtesy the artist & SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna
The sculptural practice of Irina Lotarevich (b. 1991, Rybinsk, Russia) examines the structures and systems that shape contemporary life. Working primarily with metal, Lotarevich draws on the visual languages of financial markets, industrial production and administrative organisation. Her works often take the form of modular constructions or precise replicas of architectural and organisational systems, which are combined with references to the human body. The works function as both objects and images, inviting viewers to read them as condensed narratives about labour and circulation.
While Volatility III (2026) and Optimism (2026) are inspired by stock market graphics or heat maps (where red and green are used to representively indicate the positive/ negative movement of stock), Fortunes (2026) references the structure of the folded paper fortune tellers used in children’s games. Here, ideas of chance, destiny and ‘fortune’ intersect with broader questions about opportunity and inequality. Across all three works, precise craftsmanship is combined with processes that allow for chance, revealing both the rigidity and instability of the systems they evoke.
Lazar Lyutakov
Zwischendecke, 2026
20 works from the series Lamp Series, 2008–ongoing
Chúka Lamp, 2025; #68 Lamp, 2025; Tokyo Edition #3, 2025; Harlequin Lamp red, 2025; Harlequin Lamp green, 2025; Harlequin Lamp yellow, 2024; Caravanserai Lamp #1, 2023; Caravanserai Lamp #2, 2023; Caravanserai Lamp #3, 2023; #Slava Ukraini Lamp, 2023; “It’s a boy!” Lamp, 2023; “It’s a girl!” Lamp, 2023; Plissé Lamp #1, 2025; Plissé Lamp #2, 2025; Arakawa Lamp, 2023; Geisha Lamp, 2023; Samurai Lamp, 2023; Baby Lamp AP #1, 2026; Baby Lamp AP #2, 2026; Baby Lamp AP #3, 2026
Aluminium, acrylic, plastic holders, electric cable, light bulbs
Courtesy the artist & Charim Galerie, Vienna
Lazar Lyutakov’s (b. 1977, Shabla, Bulgaria) work questions the hierarchies of contemporary culture and its ambitions between high-end and the everyday. The latter, according to the artist, has a far greater impact on the Zeitgeist; it not only reflects forms of mass consumption and its struggles with taste and value systems but also the production conditions in times of globalised capitalism. Lyutakov’s practice explores these logistics as well as the possibilities for playing them out or subverting them. Conceived especially for this exhibition, Zwischendecke [Suspended Ceiling] (2026) – employs various mass-produced plastic vessels that the artist acquired from markets worldwide. The installation is a deliberate hybrid between art, design and interior architecture, examining the question of value – also in relation to the institutional context in which it is presented. Lyutakov’s oversized ‘chandelier’ for Kunsthalle Wien’s Ziegelfoyer marks the entrance to the exhibition, functioning as a bold celebration of the space and this exceptional occasion. At the same time, it serves an ancillary space, lighting a part of the building that is accessible beyond exhibition hours and available to become part of another moment, thus returning the objects to a functional role within everyday life.
Harkeerat Mangat
Looping, 2026
Installation
Lachendes Wien, Hamilton 992B, 2026
Video
Courtesy the artist
The works of Harkeerat Mangat (b. 1990, Vancouver, Canada) examine the differences between how time-based experiences are designed and how they are actually experienced. With a background in filmmaking, Indian classical music, and cognitive neuroscience, he explores how sequence, rhythm, and the mind work together to shape our sense of duration. Looping (2026) comprises a large-format photograph, a double-sided frame and six ink drawings. As viewers move through the installation, elements are revealed and concealed, leaving them to assemble the work in their minds.
The work begins with a photograph of the newly constructed Wiener Looping roller coaster at Vienna’s Prater. It captures a group of riders at a moment of apparent weightlessness, produced by the carefully engineered interplay of gravitational and inertial forces. Behind it is a series of four drawings on a red panel: an abstraction evoking the sensation of the ride itself; a series of calligraphic exercises that trace subtle variations in form; a rendering of Wiener Looping’s track layout based on the engineer’s plans; and a diagram of how continuous experience is segmented into discrete events. Protruding on a separate plane, a double-sided frame encases two drawn grids of cartoon riders’ expressions that shift at different moments of the ride. Looping (2026), brings design and lived reality into a continuous feedback loop, where expectation and surprise fold back on one another.
Lachendes Wien, Hamilton 992B [Laughing Vienna, Hamilton 992B] (2026) is a video that plays out over 24 hours. A revolving mechanical watch is intercut with macro footage of drawings by the Viennese caricaturist Theo Zasche (1862–1922). Originally published as a collection in 1925 under the title Lachendes Wien, Zasche’s drawings illustrate everyday life in early 1920s Vienna. While the watch functions as an instrument for marking the passing of time, Zasche’s expressive illustrations show how time has been lived, filled and given meaning.
Wolfgang Matuschek
Untitled (2), (1), (4), (5), (3), 2026
Ink on paper, Frame
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of Kunsthalle Wien Club
Wolfgang Matuschek (b. 1989, Vienna, Austria) develops highly detailed ink on paper compositions that explore space and narrative ambiguity. His drawings are characterised by dense networks of fine lines, delicate hatching and subtle tonal contrasts, creating intricate spatial environments that seem almost too complex to fully grasp at once. Within these layered scenes, everyday objects, such as food or fragments of domestic life, appear alongside architectural structures, shifting between clarity and illusion.
Matuschek’s drawings often evoke a suspended moment, charged with a sense of anticipation or unease. It remains unclear whether events have already occurred or are about to unfold, as multiple perspectives and overlapping spatial systems destabilise orientation. Scenes evolve intuitively during the drawing process, creating tension between subjective perception and constructed space. Matuschek’s practice invites a heightened awareness of both the depicted spaces and the surrounding exhibition environment, where perception becomes an active process of navigating uncertainty and interpretation.
Till Megerle
Untitled, 2025
Untitled, 2026
Untitled, 2026
Pencil on paper, artist’s frame
Katia, 2025
To be kind, 2019
Pen and pencil on cardboard, artist’s frame
Untitled (Wahltag Schultag), 2025
Pen, watercolour marker and pencil on paper, artist’s frame
Courtesy the artist
These drawings by Till Megerle (b. 1979, Bayreuth, Germany) depict figures arranged in shifting constellations. The works explore social behaviour, dependencies and power relations, staging encounters that seem to oscillate between playfulness and latent violence.
Working across drawing, photography, video and performance, Megerle’s practice is rooted in the social environments that have shaped him, particularly music and collective experiences within subcultures, but also his family background. He moves fluidly between roles – as participant and observer, artist and musician – and draws on friendships, shared spaces and recurring situations as source material. These lived contexts are translated into images in which bodies appear intertwined, leaning on or resisting one another, as if responding to invisible pressures.
The drawings often begin as quick, serial sketches in pencil or ballpoint pen, sometimes later developed into more detailed compositions and formed by the materials and tools available. Some of these sketches also function as visual references during rehearsals with his band Guiding Light, in which Megerle collaborates with the musicians Michaela Kisling and Artjom Astrov. This exchange between drawing and music reflects an open, process-based approach to making, reacting to and interacting with the immediate surroundings.
Christoph Meier
Ohne Titel (Cis), 2026
Bronze, steel, hemp
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of Kunsthalle Wien Club
Christoph Meier’s practice (b. 1980, Vienna, Austria) spans sculpture, installation and sound, often resulting in site-specific works. His work is shaped by an interest in how objects are activated through encounters, how they function within architecture, in acoustics and the presence of viewers, as opposed to the treatment of sculpture as immutable, self-contained forms. Untitled (C#2) (2026) takes the form of a traditional bell that was conceived for the canopied space on the threshold of Kunsthalle Wien’s Museumsquartier premises. The sculpture continues the artist’s engagement with sound as both material and subject. Designed by Meier and produced by a traditional bell foundry in Innsbruck, the bell is tuned to Csharp two, echoing the C of the ‘Pummerin’ bell at Vienna’s Stephansdom, yet held in deliberate offset. Its surface is covered with cast cigarettes and lighters, a detail describing its role as a social sculpture, while also responding to the site’s informal use as a smoking area.
Rini Mitra
Pond, 2025
Soft pastel on paper
Courtesy the artist
Rini Mitra’s (b. 1984, Jamalpur, Bangladesh) vibrant drawings portray her recollections of rural Bangladesh. The artist uses pen on A4 sheets of paper to map out a preliminary sketch. From this initial drawing, she scans, enlarges and divides it in sections to be reproduced and tiled in A4 sheets. Swathes of chalk pastel blur into and over one another. Thick black lines are laid down, effaced, then reapplied again. Finally, the individual sheets of paper are brought back together and organised into a patchwork of multiple panels. The assembly of distinct fragments into a greater composition reveals not just the completed picture but also its overlaps, inconsistencies and gaps. There are places where the drawings jostle awkwardly, where lines refuse to meet up and colours shift in tone. As a sum of these parts, the images are partial and dysfunctional, their jagged edges either left askew or visibly smoothed over and the seams showing; at once points of connection and rupture running through the composition.
Ute Müller
Portals, 2026
Acrylic, egg tempera on reflective canvas
Courtesy the artist
Ute Müller (b. 1978, Graz, Austria) has developed a distinctive visual language of forms that function like ciphers in painting, drawing and installation. Her compositions, often executed in a muted grey palette using egg tempera, unfold gradually through layered surfaces according to light, space and the viewer’s position. Rather than offering immediate clarity, these works invite a slow, processual mode of seeing, in which figurative elements emerge over time. Meaning resides in the temporal experience of perception itself, as emphasised by the reflective surface of the works on display here from the new, 10-part series, Portals (2026).
Müller’s idea of transition also extends to her practice more broadly, where forms migrate between image, object and environment, disrupting linear narratives. Across her work, she foregrounds the ‘in-between’ – between abstraction and representation, painting and sculpture – creating a network of associations that resists fixed interpretation.
Michaela Polacek
Omage-Sucrèttage, 2017
florage-faberéage, 2017
Pencil and pen on paper
vernast, verblümt, verduttet hinterzwischen Henkelorange, 2018
Pencil and pen on paper
Courtesy the artist & Atelier 10, Vienna
Since 2012, Michaela Polacek (b. 1972, Vienna, Austria) has focussed on making monochromatic drawings. Initially outlined in pencil, complex structures emerge in which abstract forms repeatedly transition into representational elements. She leaves these pencil drawings partially exposed beneath the ink as a way to reveal her process, while also calling it into question. Viewers might wonder why certain parts of the page are left blank or why the ink lines diverge from the drawing at certain points. Her suggestive artwork titles – such as 2 Vergegnungsmenschen und ein Schaumensch [two people meeting and one show-off person] (2018) – may mislead people into seeing something that might not appear to be represented before them. Instead, she invites us to stand before the work and form our own view of the abstract material and the accumulation of time on which these drawings – and Polacek’s practice – is based on and draws from.
Lukas Posch
Untitled, 2026
Untitled, 2026
Oil on canvas
Collection of Patrick Collins
Courtesy of FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna
Lukas Posch (b. 1988, Hall in Tirol, Austria) works across the threshold of figuration and abstraction, creating compositions in which precisely rendered forms coexist with imagery that remains deliberately open to interpretation. His paintings often feature openings, portals or framed sections that function as visual entry points, while simultaneously drawing attention to the work’s status as both image and object. Across his work, Posch introduces pictograms, icons and symbolic shortcuts that draw on a shared visual vocabulary. Constellations, architectural interiors, fragments of figures or diagrammatic structures appear alongside more ambiguous shapes and fields of colour, evoking references from art history, design and the circulation of images in contemporary media. The resulting paintings feel oddly familiar, evading full deciphering and any clear narrative resolution.
Vika Prokopaviciute
Horizontal Vertigo, 2026
Reversed Vista (Onion of Anger), 2026
Vita Left, 2025
Vista Right, 2025
Oil and acrylic on linen
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of the Kunsthalle Wien Club
The paintings of Vika Prokopaviciute (b. 1983, Vilnius, Lithuania) are based on the premise that meaning is not fixed but constantly in flux. Her works avoid explicit references in favour of suggesting spatial configurations or abstract concepts such as the border, the vortex or the fold. At times, crystalline structures or perspectival lines might appear, yet every structure simultaneously implies its own dissolution into a realm that resists such speculations. In this sense, looking at Prokopaviciute’s paintings can be a productive disappointment, one that makes any sense of realism collapse and shifts the question of certainty. She uses painting to speculate about possible answers that are inherent to painting itself, while addressing fundamental issues: What do things look like to different people or from a different perspective? What happens when the lighting conditions change? What emerges in the transition from one painting to the next?
Lucia Elena Průša
Untitled (U 2000), 2026
Untitled (U 1995), 2026
Untitled (L, C, T), 2026
Book cloth, aluminum
Courtesy the artist
The practice of Lucia Elena Průša (b. 1985, Munich, Germany) is dedicated to the performativity of objects examining the conditions of their circulation. She often works with found, gifted, or borrowed items, including euro coins, personal belongings and objects from urban structures. She transfers bookbinding techniques – such as folding, covering, and laminating – onto her sculptural works as they demand a precise understanding of materials, their tensions and resistances. The works are then carefully placed in reference to their specific sites of display; how they are exhibited being ultimately determined by their given environment. Such is the case with Untitled (U 2000) (2026), which the artist sees as a ‘directionless’ object.
Liesl Raff
Wallpiece (Heidi 1), 2026
Wallpiece (Heidi 2), 2026
Latex, pigment, talcum, fabric, plastic
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna
Liesl Raff (b. 1979, Stuttgart, Germany) creates sculptural environments from handcast natural rubber combined with a range of supporting materials. Ropes, textiles, metal and dried plants act as carriers for the latex, giving rise to spatial constellations and social formations that invite viewers to gather beneath or around them.
In these two wall pieces, Raff uses a light gauze as a support for the latex. The resultant tapestries bring together material oppositions, appearing at once fragile and resilient, translucent and opaque, light and heavy. Hung in relation to one another, they subtly soften the exhibition space, creating conditions in which these material nuances can be observed more closely.
Shuvo Rafiqul
Outside of the Club Troubadour, 2026
Acrylic and pen
2026(1), 2026
Acrylic and pen on canvas
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of Kunsthalle Wien Club
Over the last years, painting has become increasingly central to the broader practice of Shuvo Rafiqul (b. 1982, Dhaka, Bangladesh), which also encompasses film, sculpture, and drawing. Evading an explicit narrative, his compositions find a rhythm in the movement of the brush across rigid, pre-determined structures. These appear as geometric, gridlike layouts upon which layers of recurring visual patterns and abstract shapes in bright colours are progressively applied. Rafiqul developed his mural Outside of the Club Troubadour (2026) at Kunsthalle Wien, as he says, based on the idea of a ‘game with a set of rules’, which also draws on his own background as a cricket player: navigating the interplay between chance and control, he considers how self-expression necessarily negotiates pre-established modes of representation – for example, the influence of Western pictorial tradition on his artistic practice. Perspective, he shows, is not neutral, but moulded by external influences and expectations. Rather than rejecting these inherited structures, Rafiqul engages with them, exploring their boundaries through clash and contrast in search of possible new approaches.
Hans Schabus
Walking to the Sea (In Search of the Endless Column – Vom Wiener Null zum Adria Null), 2025/2026
Clipboards with photocopies
Courtesy the artist & ZERO...
Walking to the Sea (In Search of the Endless Column – Vom Wiener Null zum Adria Null) (2025/2026) by Hans Schabus (b. 1970, Watschig, Austria) is a series of 23 photographs mounted on clip boards that document a journey that the artist took from Vienna to Trieste over 23 days last year. Accompanied by his dog Enzo, Schabus walked from the historical ‘Wiener Null’ to the ‘Adria Null,’ the reference points used by the Austrian land survey system to measure elevation. Each photograph represents a single day of this 576.8-kilometre trek, capturing paths, streets and trails with a consistent forward-looking perspective that connects the journey’s starting and ending points.
Schabus’ work is rooted in architecture and sculpture and revolves around questions of location and movement: What constitutes a place? And what happens in between?
The 23 photographs are installed at eye level within a temporary wall.
Anna Schachinger
Niña con pajaro, 2026
Mujer plachando huecos, 2026
Nisperos, 2026
Oil on linen
Courtesy the artist & SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna
Niña con pajaro [Girl with Bird] (2026), Mujer planchando huecos [girl ironing holes] (2026) and Nisperos [medlars] (2026) are three new paintings by Anna Schachinger (b. 1990, Vienna, Austria), forming a series that explores a domestic scene and its broader gendered dimensions. The works depict a woman ironing her own dress so intensely that the heat repeatedly leaves quasiornamental holes across the fabric, while smoke rises around her. A child stands facing the window, as if torn between the desire to escape and the confines of the room.
Schachinger’s production process often reorders the conventional stages of painterly application. Her preparatory sketches, underdrawings and initial marks are treated as integral components of the finished work. Over these, she layers pigment, fabric fragments, threads and washes of ink, producing palimpsestic surfaces in which figurative and abstract elements interweave. Curlicues, broken lines and sinuous strokes float above the compositions, tracing both previous iterations and new gestures, and highlighting the ongoing interplay of chance and control in her work.
Ashley Hans Scheirl
Ashley Hans Scheirl (b. 1956, Salzburg, Austria) is known for a diverse body of work that has established them as a pioneer in queer-feminist and transgender counterculture. Marked by constant transformation, shifting perspectives and a willingness to take bold artistic risks, their practice has evolved from Super 8 film in the 1970s to a distinctive painterly approach from the mid-1990s onwards. Under the maxim ‘Transgender! Transmedium! Transgenre!’ Scheirl attempts to challenge the traditional fixation with painting as a privileged artistic practice. Instead, their approach to painting is physical, relating directly to the complexity of the human body. Expressionism meets realism in canvases where the liquid properties of bodily fluids become equivalents to the way paint is sprayed or smeared onto a surface. This expanded understanding of the expressive possibilities of paint ensues across 20 new paintings presented here on a wall that enlarges two of these works in a wallpaper. Employing a subdued, tonal palette and painting directly with fingers instead of a brush on cardboard, the gestures mimic the tactile motion of interacting with images on a digital touch screen. The works evoke a leaden sky landscape akin to cloud studies, which analogise digital ‘cloud storage’.
Katharina Schilling
A river that loses its name when it flows into the sea, 2026
Trinity, 2026
Showings, 2026
Pigment, oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of Kunsthalle Wien Club
Katharina Schilling (b. 1984, Cologne, Germany) develops paintings through processes of appropriation, fragmentation and recontextualisation, drawing on art history, traditional techniques and modes of presentation. Her practice questions ideas of authorship and subjectivity by deliberately destabilising the role of the individual artist. Working on unprimed canvas, she applies pigments mixed with glue and water, allowing the chance of material behaviour to shape the surface before cutting, reassembling or stitching the canvas into its final form. Figurative elements – often everyday objects such as matches, scissors or eggs – are added later, appearing suspended between abstraction and recognition. By engaging with pre-modern imagery and notions of collaborative authorship, she proposes painting as a shared, evolving field – one that challenges notions of singular authorship and opens space for multiplicity and continuity.
Toni Schmale
das management, 2017
Hot-galvanised steel, sandblasted steel, Nextel 90 FH
triptychon, 1/3 circlusion, 2026
Forged, waxed, polished steel
feuerbock, 2026
Hot-galvanised steel, powder-coated steel RAL 9005, brass, Biresin 450
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna
The concrete and steel sculptures of Toni Schmale (b. 1980, Hamburg, Germany) often resemble utilitarian objects with a performative promise that remains unfulfilled. Schmale’s sculptures refer to the conditioning of the human body, inviting us to imagine actions that can be performed on or with them. Works like das management [the management] (2017) play with ideas of activating the neoliberal body by resembling fitness equipment. Other works expose our own physical desires in the associations they evoke. feuerbock [andiron] (2015), for instance, refers to St Andrew’s cross – a cross with two diagonally intersecting beams named after the apostle martyred on it. The form appears across a wide range of contexts, from the skull and crossbones symbol to heraldic emblems; as a dominant metal structure, however, it also invites associations with BDSM. Such aesthetic and material contradictions in sculpture are fully embraced in Schmale’s work.
triptychon, 1/3 circlusion [triptych, 1/3 circlusion] (2026) engages with the concept of circlusion developed by writer Bini Adamczak as a counterterm to penetration. Both terms describe the same material process but from opposing perspectives. While penetration focuses on one body entering another, circlusion shifts focus to the body that encloses or pulls itself around something thus challenging assumptions about active and passive roles.
Nora Schultz
Clock / Bender / Niche / Gatherer, 2026
Glass, acrylic, wood, fibers, fiberglass, inkjet print on paper, lacquer, tin, steel
Courtesy the artist & Galerie MEYER*KAINER, Vienna
Nora Schultz (b. 1975, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) examines the ways in which matter and language intertwine in our relationship to the environment. Frequently working with industrial materials and in reference to architectural structures and urban design, Schultz transforms and reconfigures elements in response to specific exhibition spaces. Driven by notions of displacement and process, her works generate unstable configurations that unsettle habitual modes of perception and identification, engaging the viewer in a renewed sensory and mental experience of space and materiality.
Clock / Bender / Niche / Gatherer (2026) continues a series of ‘clock’ works that the artist started making in 2025. In this work the clock is constructed from found panes of double-glazing, an acrylic vitrine, steel rods and objects cast from tin. A photographic print of a niche, collaged into a face-like configuration, introduces the figure of a ‘bender’ or ‘gatherer’, who collects branches and time, bending them into a niche or pocket within a sculptural form that might also be seen as a habitat for the gatherer.
Sergey Spirikhin
Am Meeresufer oder ein Museum im Museum, 2026
Steel, sand, watercolour on paper, text on paper, various objects, glass
Courtesy the artist
The drawings, watercolours and writing of Sergey Spirikhin (b. 1963, Severodvinsk, Russia) are rooted in observation, improvisation and reflection. Originally known for his performances and as a member of the artist group The New Block-heads (1996–2002), his work employs seemingly anachronistic media, drawing upon an extensive knowledge of philosophy, literature and history, which are approached with a degree of absurdity. In contrast to the speed and excess of digital imagery, Spirikhin foregrounds slower modes of looking and thinking, inviting viewers to engage attentively with time.
His small-scale watercolours – often described as compositional exercises – are created through a responsive process in which pigment spreads and settles unpredictably on the paper. From this interplay between control and chance, loosely defined figures and scenes emerge. Suspended against largely untouched backgrounds, these characters engage in everyday or enigmatic actions – playing music, conversing, observing – which are rendered with a quiet, surreal quality.
Lucie Stahl
Dream State 14–19, 2026
Inkjet print on aluminium, frame
Courtesy the artist
Lucie Stahl (b. 1977, Berlin, Germany) works with photography, sculpture and installation to explore the entangled relationship between individuals and larger social, psychological and economic systems. Her practice is shaped by a photographic approach to staging objects and situations in ways that reveal underlying structures of power, desire and control, often evoking a sense of unease and ambiguity.
In Dream State (2026), Stahl presents a series of photographs featuring small, brightly coloured objects commonly used in systemic therapy to represent social roles and relationships. Set within dark environments reminiscent of models, these figures appear in softly blurred, almost dreamlike compositions. While such tools are typically used to visualise interpersonal dynamics, Stahl abstracts them into enigmatic scenes. The figures become both individuals and standins for larger collectives, suggesting how personal experiences are shaped by broader social and political frameworks.
Josef Strau
Hypostasicisms Number 2: Wall with an Entrance, 2026
Installation with wall, images and text
J wrestling with A, 2023
Inkjet print, frame
Greening Semiurgh, 2025
Oil, dammar resin, pencil, pigment, sulphur with melted tin vessels and magnets on canvas
Courtesy the artist & Layr, Vienna
Josef Strau (b. 1957, Vienna, Austria) has developed a multifaceted practice that spans writing, installation, publishing and exhibition-making. Although born in Vienna, his work has largely evolved in an international context, shaped by periods of time spent in Cologne, Berlin and New York. Across these shifting environments, Strau has adopted multiple roles – as artist, writer, organiser and curator – often challenging conventions and norms within the art world.
Central to the artist’s work is the relationship between text, meaning and display. Strau’s installations frequently combine printed matter, lighting and spatial arrangements that evoke situationsforreading, invitingviewerstoactivelypiecetogether fragmented narratives. These installations emphasise interpretation as an open-ended process, influenced by his longstanding engagement with literature and philosophy.
Laurence Sturla
Fieldnotes (The face of a drowned man), 2026
Overfired ceramic, ceramic slurry, salt, rust, steel structure
Fieldnotes (Circadian low), 2026
Fieldnotes (Lark ascending), 2026
Overfired ceramic, graphite, salt, rust, steel structure
Courtesy the artist & GIANNI MANHATTAN, Vienna
Laurence Sturla (b. 1992, Swindon, United Kingdom) creates sculptures that evoke the remnants of industrial systems while simultaneously suggesting anatomical structures and organic processes. Working with clay, he folds earlier, unfired frag-ments back into new forms, producing surfaces that appear weathered and marked by their own past.
Sturla’s forms recall disused machinery – pipes, valves or engine parts – yet their function remains ambiguous. Openings, channels and protrusions hint at circulation and flow, while bolts and clamps suggest provisional assembly. Oriented vertically, they begin to resemble organs or anatomical systems, with cavities and conduits echoing lungs, intestines or vascular networks. Understood as both objects and archives, each sculpture is layered with material memory, registering cycles of transformation and a continuous process of accumulation, breakdown and renewal.
Marina Sula
Black-out, 2026
UV-print on substrate
Untitled, 2026
Pigment print on archival paper, frame
Courtesy the artist
Marina Sula (b. 1991, Lezhë, Albania) works across installation, photography and sculpture. In her practice, the image operates as both material and condition. Positioned between documentation and construction, she explores how images and objects produce, carry, and shift meaning as they circulate. Sula’s images often extend into space: stretched, segmented or embedded within structures that recall systems of display, advertising, or everyday use. The works register and reflect their surroundings, positioning viewers within the space around them. In these arrangements, the image moves between the surface and the object, between proximity and distance.
Sula’s work attends to how meaning emerges through repetition, displacement, and spatial relations. Rather than resolving into a narrative, her images remain suspended – activated through their placement, fragmentation and the conditions of their encounter. This approach is also evident in her largescale photographic mural, which connects three floors of the exhibition. Black-out (2026) is based on the work Untitled (2026); an image taken in the aftermath of a party. Enlarged and pasted onto the wall between the ground and upper floor, the work greets passers-by with an image of muted celebration and fractured space.
Huda Takriti
On Another Note, 2024
2-channel HD video
24 min
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Crone, Berlin/Vienna
Huda Takriti (b. 1990, Damascus, Syria) produces videos and installations that explore how histories are constructed, remembered and contested. Arab histories, including the Syrian Civil War, the Algerian Revolution and the Palestinian Nakba, are the subject of layered constellations of images and texts with which Takriti questions the authority of official accounts. Drawing on archival material, family photographs, found footage and oral testimony, she challenges linear, official historical narratives, by focusing on their gaps, omissions and contradictions. Her practice is rooted in an expanded understanding of the archive as a site of interpretation where meaning remains open and unstable.
In her film, On Another Note (2024), she constructs an intimate portrait of her grandmother, Hikmat al-Habbal, through photographs, textiles and spoken memory. Through collage, editing and sound, she evokes a presence that remains somewhat absent, her grandmother being only represented via traces, gestures and recollections. As the film moves between past and present, it suggests that memory is not static but continuously reconfigured. In foregrounding intimacy, fragmentation and the incompleteness of something that cannot be fully recovered, Takriti thus proposes an alternative approach to writing histories.
Sergei Tcherepnin
Birds, 2026
Copper, brass, silk, aluminium, LED, motion sensors, transducers, amplifier, wire, MP3 shield
Courtesy the artist
Sergei Tcherepnin (b. 1981, Boston, USA) works with sound, musical scores, sculpture and performance, to create environments in which listening becomes an unpredictable experience. Known for research-driven, multi-channel installations that combine audio, objects and images, he creates immersive constellations, where meaning unfolds through atmosphere and activation.
At Kunsthalle Wien, Tcherepnin presents Birds (2026), two sculptures that employ light and sound, playing sequences from songs of different male pairs of the kōkako – an endangered bird endemic to New Zealand. Long studied for its many peculiarities, the kōkako’s song is very long and slow. Always sung in pairs, each pair of birds has its own unique song. Kōkako pairs can be male-female or same-sex; their duet serving not only to mark and defend a territory, but to form and maintain partnerships. In his sculptures,Tcherepnin uses a mixture of synthesized kōkako voices, combined with archival recordings from the 1990s, which were captured by Jeff McLeod as part of his research on the differences between the song of male and female same sex pairs.
Sophie Thun
Wet Rooms (Place de la Gare, Belgradstrasse, Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse, Friedrichstrasse), 2025
Raum 2 - Farbe (abgebaut) auf Schwarzweiß, Etage zwei zu drei, 2024
Gelatin silver print, photogram, baryta paper, magnets
Courtesy the artist & SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna
Sophie Thun (b. 1985, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) employs analogue photography as both medium and subject, examining the relationship between body, space and the conditions of image production. Her practice foregrounds the material and technical processes of photography, often incorporating her own body – most frequently her hands – in the image. Rather than presenting herself as an authorial figure, Thun positions herself within the systems that shape photographic production, from the labour involved in making an image to the histories of representation. In this exhibition, two works are presented back-to-back, showing on the one side a subject that broadly relates to working and, on the other, an image that can be associated with living or the repetition of domestic interiors in her work.
Johanna Charlotte Trede
Gegenstand zur einfachen Erhöhung, 2026
Wood
Gegenstand zur einfachen Bewegung, 2026
Three trollies
Courtesy the artist
Commissioned with the support of the Kunsthalle Wien Club
Johanna Charlotte Trede (b. 1990, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) appropriates forms and materials already in circulation. What she collects are not objects so much as forms: fragments leaning against scaffolding, geometric remnants from demolition sites, pieces that appear already detached from purpose.
In Gegenstand zur einfachen Erhöhung [Device for Easy Elevation] (2026), she salvages wood panels from construction sites that were once used as make-shift steps. They are initially made crudely and with the minimum of materials required to produce a functional solution, rather than an aesthetic form. Removed from this context, they shed their original function to gain new meanings. The steps perhaps lead to nowhere, but they can still have another purpose; as aesthetic objects, small tables, stools or obnoxious obstacles. Trede considers the work to be completed by its context and therefore the materials are elevated to sculpture.
Gegenstand zur einfachen Bewegung [Device for Easy Movement] (2026) consists of three trollies that were used for different purposes by various people. It belongs to a series of works in which Trede investigates how objects and forms activate space, reorganise perception, and generate meanings beyond their original function. Three carts previously used by art handlers and welders (among others), for transporting goods and materials to the market or at the swimming pool are installed in the exhibition space. What interests Trede is how these different individuals and places can be connected by the same functional object. Furthermore, the process by which the artist acquires the object is viewed by Trede as part of the work.
Emily Wardill
Identical, 2023
2-channel HD video
16 min
Courtesy the artist & carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid
The film and installation works of Emily Wardill (b. 1977, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom) examine how imaginary images structure and influence meaning across a variety of fields. In Identical (2023), two sequences of moving images unfold in parallel, appearing to echo and compete with one another. Footage that Wardill shot with dancers is combined with excerpts from broadcast media and different genres of film that appear as shared cultural memories. The two streams of imagery overlap and diverge, while the soundtrack splits and proliferates into poly-phony. Moments of apparent synchronicity give way to slippages, as sequences fall out of alignment and coersive images get stuck in loops like ear worms.
The motif of doubling runs throughout the work. Drawing on the Fibonacci sequence, inspired by Inger Christensen’s poem Alphabet (1981), the installation builds patterns that suggest mathematical rules within living things. Viewers are denied a single, stable perspective, with attention split between the two projections, each representing only a partial view of the whole.
Dario Wokurka
Proposal/Platz der Arbeit, 2024
Untitled (Kunsthalle '93), 2026
Untitled (Reference Hell-O Extended), 2026
Acrylic on linen
Courtesy the artist & Lombardi—Kargl, Vienna
Dario Wokurka (b. 1988, Vienna, Austria) often works according to precise conceptual frameworks, which guide his actions while leaving room for chance and intuition. He creates painterly translations of visual information – allowing distortions, modulations and shifts in meaning to emerge as integral elements of the work. His source material, usually digital, is mainly selected for its self-reflexive qualities.
Proposal/Platz der Arbeit [Proposal/Square of Labour] (2024) deploys the medium of painting to propose an alternative design for Vienna’s Dr Karl Lueger Square: keeping only the monument's plinth and renaming the square ‘Platz der Arbeit’ [Square of Labour]. The redesign of the central monument to the eponymous former mayor – notorious for his openly anti-Semitic views – was the subject of a public art competition in 2023, to which Wokurka had not been invited. Untitled (Kunsthalle '93) (2026) depicts the 1993 exhibition Der zerbrochene Spiegel, a critical survey of the possibilities of painting, which was on view at Kunsthalle Wien’s first building at Karlsplatz, designed by architect Adolf Krischanitz. Untitled (Reference Hell-O Extended) (2026) is a work from Wokurka's series Rag Rug Pictures (2017–ongoing), in which the artist unravels mass-produced rag rugs and sews their fabrics into continuous surfaces which he then stretches flat over cotton canvases of corresponding dimensions.
Min Yoon
Break + ing Time (left), 2024
Break + ing Time (top), 2024
Break + ing Time (front (proposal)), 2024
Water-miscible oil on burlap, thread, polyester, wool felt, hotpatch, magnets, brush, artist’s frame
The Creator, 2024
Wool felt, Styrofoam, mineral polymer, steel, fabric, polyester filling
B + ing: Nah + Da + Um – False Friend, 2024
2 parts: oil on canvas, artist’s frame; plywood, wooden handles, fabric, tubes of oil paint
Courtesy the artist
Painting, drawing and sculpture come together in Min Yoon’s (b. 1986, Cheonan, South Korea) installation to form a playful yet unstable world. The hand and hand puppets are recurrent motifs, suggesting the presence of the eponymous ‘Creator’. A vertical structure divides the wall with works installed on both sides, echoing the artist’s work Perspectives + ing (2024). By exposing what is usually hidden – the ‘backstage’ of display – Yoon foregrounds the frameworks through which art is encountered. Across the paintings, he explores how time is experienced, interrupted and fragmented. Elements seem to shift or disintegrate during the creator’s ‘break time’: letters fall out of order and words dissolve as the artist reflects on authorship, perception and the conditions of art-making.