Screening and Q&A with Rah Eleh (EN)
The Kunsthalle Wien is pleased to host SALOON Wien with a screening of video artworks by Canadian-Iranian artist Rah Eleh. The programme will showcase Prompt: Technofetishism (2025), DissemiNation (2023) and SuperNova (2019). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with curator and historian Dr. Julia Hartmann.
Rah Eleh’s work critically engages heterogeneous speculative practices, their role in maintaining ethnic nationalism, and their championing of techno-utopianism. Prompt: Technofetishism brings these issues to the fore in discursive and relational encounters with leading scholars and thinkers in the burgeoning field of futurism, including Ytasha Womack, Catherine Ramírez, and Boddhisattva Chattopadhyay. DissemiNation unearths archival and textual findings to expose the construction of the nation, and juxtaposes romantic proclamations alongside ultraconservative, exclusionary rhetoric. SuperNova pursues queer and camp aesthetics to address a lacuna in the discourse and proposes Xenofuturist principles of pluriversality, unworlding, and unbelonging as a potential remedy for the genre’s shortcomings.
The screening will take place at the studio (lower floor) and is free of charge with a valid exhibition ticket.
Every Thursday Night 17:00–20:00: pay what you can!
Rah Eleh
Rah Eleh (b.1985 in Iran) is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, a visual artist and the founder and director of Saloon Toronto. She currently has work at the National Museum of Norway, le Musée d'art de Joliette, and the Karsh-Masson Gallery. She has exhibited extensively at Cairotronica (Egypt), Venice Biennale (ECC, Palazzo Mora), Vögele Kultur Zentrum (Pfäffikon, Switzerland), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Vienna Art Week (Austria), and Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), amongst others. Rah Eleh has held teaching positions at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, the European Cultural Center, and the University of Toronto, and has lectured at NYU, Pace University, Parsons: The New School, School of Visual Arts, NY, and Alfred University, among others. Rah Eleh is represented by de Montigny Contemporary and Vtape, Canada’s leading artist-run distributor for video art.
SALOON Vienna
SALOON Vienna is a network designed for FLINTA* in the Viennese art scene and is part of the international SALOON Network, a non-profit organization active in 15 cities around the world. Monthly SALOON meetings offer members opportunities to present their work, projects, and exhibitions, and to visit leading artists, curators, galleries, museums, and other significant figures in Vienna’s art community. These gatherings aim to foster dialogue and exchange between members and Viennese institutions, connecting art practitioners across all fields.