On selected Tuesday evenings, artists from the exhibition Come as You Are. Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2023 and our art education team meet for a joint discussion on their artistic practice. After the 20-minute talk, there will be an opportunity to take a tour of the exhibition together.
This program is free of charge and no prior registration is needed.
The artist talk will be held in English.
Mila Balzhieva’s multidisciplinary artistic practice combines scientific inquiry with her curiosity for the otherworldly. Her installation, Roots and Spirits, encourages viewers to reconsider their perspectives on the Anthropocene (and the ways in which humans interact with nature and vice versa). Taking her houseplant as a point of departure, Balzhieva was interested in finding a visual language that translated the possibilities and limitations of interspecies communication. Through her research, she was surprised at the complexity of the houseplant’s existence; for example, such as its sometimes erratic behavior despite its inherent desire to thrive. Allowing herself to succumb to the perplexing nature of the organism, Balzhieva used the experience to broaden her way of thinking, choosing to seek inspiration in the inexplicable rather than answers. Balzhieva poetically encapsulates this process in a hologram of the house plant that floats midair: a magical apparition of a solid object that one is incapable of grasping.