Our exhibition Handspells, showcasing the winners of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2021 and for the first time designed as a group exhibition, is on view only until May 22! On its last weekend, we would like to celebrate the fruitful work done collectively and the prospect of continuing the collaboration with the involved artists in the future.
The exhibition, with a display by Julia Hohenwarter, features works by Diana Barbosa Gil, Cho Beom-Seok, Jojo Gronostay, Ani Gurashvili, Lukas Kaufmann, Nora Severios, Anna Spanlang (with textile sculptures by Sunny Pfalzer), and Chin Tsao. It showcases the transformative and creative – sometimes magic – power of mundane gestures, techniques, habits, on the real, on bodies and on imaginaries.
Let’s spend some time together in the exhibition space on its last evening, in the company of the artists, their artworks, two performances, and with some drinks!
Plus: Take the opportunity to get your own copy of the newly released Handspells publication including more information about the artworks, additional contributions by the artists, a conversation around their living and working conditions as well as an essay by Georgia Holz emphasizing the elective affinities at play in the exhibition and in society at large.
At 6 pm, curator Anne Faucheret will guide through the show together with the artists present.
At 7 pm, Diana Barbosa Gil will present The best Idea ever. In this performance, she concentrates the approaches and prostheses from her 2021 eponymous diploma thesis in a poetic manifestation.
At 7:30 pm, Anna Spanlang will present her reading performance My daughter tells me, that when I was her age, the world was definitely much more exciting than hers – Part #1, a precisely arranged multimedia medley of Instagram stories, texts, and conversation excerpts that the artist encountered in her research.
Diana Barbosa Gil creates performative and sculptural installations that function as a kind of highly personal coordinate system by setting various ideas, techniques, objects, styles, or motifs from different moments in history in interrelation. Loud and fragile at once, her work constellations tell stories of the quest for an origin and a defined place in the now, while also bearing witness to the absurd pressure artists struggle with today to keep producing new and better art.
Anna Spanlang’s works seek to limn a poetics of the ordinary while underscoring the political dimension of an everyday life in which community, friendship, and feminism are actually lived and not just discussed. Her films, full of sharp wit and loving care, are based on a very specific editing and hence reinterpretation of the autobiographical video material she recorded on her mobile phone in the last ten years.