Exhibition Opening
Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud

We warmly invite you to celebrate the exhibition opening Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud. On annotating, editing and making text in contemporary art with us.

19:00 Speeches (with translation in Austrian Sign Language)

Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director Kunsthalle Wien

Gina Merz, Curator

Performance by Ville Laurinkoski

Free admission

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud is an exhibition incorporating a programme of performance, readings, discussions and exchange with a focus on text in the field of contemporary art. Conceived as a group exhibition in progress, artworks installed at its inception will be in dialogue with numerous performative interventions taking place at and around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz over a course of four months. Looking closely at the practice of annotating, editing and writing in art, the format of the exhibition considers text as the framework for or ‘skeleton’ of artmaking – expanding its status beyond the preliminary note.

Artists: Anahita Asadifar, Sanna Helena Berger, Lara Dâmaso, Joshua Leon, Ville Laurinkoski, Prosopopoeia, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Lisa Robertson, Shanzhai Lyric, Miriam Stoney, Ian Waelder und Eleanor Ivory Weber

Performance by Ville Laurinkoski

The performance Untitled (Vienne) unfolds as a fractured score of historical memory, erotic residue and political melancholia. The work layers voice, sound and presence into a performative montage – part confessional, part theoretical – set against the backdrop of Vienna as both city and dreamscape. Cushioned by an eclectic and dissonant soundscape – musical fragments, pornographic audio debris – the performance incorporates text by Guy Hocquenghem and gesture in a shifting exploration of identity, memory and spectacle, weaving political and intimate registers. The performer – a figure, a puppet, a social type – inhabits the spectacle of ‘the homosexual’ as both trope and trap: pathologized, mythologized and theatricalized. Untitled (Vienne) considers what it means to perform a figure that is constantly in question – at once abject, ornamental, critical, and yearning.