Discursive Talk (EN)
Mirela Baciak
Alien Inside the Familiar: Estrangement as an Artistic Method

Guan Xiao’s exhibition TEENAGER mobilizes estrangement not only as a visual strategy but as a philosophical position. Her practice disorients the viewer with playful assemblages, contradictory materialities, surreal shelters and hybrid objects – each resisting a fixed interpretation. The artist’s juxtapositions evoke the uncanny in daily life, subtly echoing broader sociopolitical disjunctions – like China’s precarious identity between ‘devotion and restrain’.

Mariela Baciak’s discursive talk takes this logic further: by exploring estrangement as a mode of critical thinking and collective inquiry into the now. Drawing from feminist psychoanalysis and post-digital theory, we will ask: What makes an object or gesture ‘estranged’?  How can artistic estrangement help us process contemporary social and political contradictions – be it adolescence, belonging, nationhood or the museum itself?

Please register at: vermittlung@kunsthallewien.at

The participatory event is free of charge with a valid exhibition ticket.
Every Thursday Night 17:00–20:00: pay what you can!

Mirela Baciak

Mirela Baciak (b. 1987 in Warsaw) is a curator in the field of visual arts whose practice is guided by the notion of hospitality as a process which captures one’s ethical relation to the unknown and the strange. She also approaches curating as a choreographic practice of putting things in spatial, temporal and conceptual relations, creating connections of bodies to objects and space, but also to concepts, ideas and other bodies; whereas distance is relative. She is committed to facilitating projects by artists that shape the art discourse of today and to create access to art and its debates to a range of publics.

She is currently serving as the director of Salzburger Kunstverein – an Austrian institution deeply committed to contemporary art and its discourse. Between 2019 and 2023 she has worked as curator at steirischer herbst festival in Graz, where she has been developing new artistic commissions and performance formats for the festival’s various editions. In 2022, she curated together with David Riff the special exhibition A War in the Distance. Prologue. An Embattled Ukraine in Video Art and Film. Before joining steirischer herbst, Baciak worked at Public Art Munich 2018, a perennial that investigated ways in which art can exist in the public realm through newly commissioned performances and interventions.

Baciak was a fellow or curator-in-residence at the EDI Global Forum for Education and Integration by Fondazione Morra Greco (2022), ARAC Bucharest (2022), Shanghai Curators Lab II (2019), HOW Art Museum Shanghai (2019), Dhaka Art Summit (2018), CCA Warsaw (2018), kültüř gemma and Kunsthalle Wien (2017) and the 7th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (2016).

She holds a master in Critical Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she was also a guest lecturer (2022) and an exhibition-committee member (2020–2021). In 2023, she initiated the AAC | Austrian Association of Curators, an organization that fosters curatorial-knowledge production, where she continues serving as a board member.