On selected Tuesday evenings, artists from the exhibition Unfreezing the Scene. Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2022 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 registration is not required.
The artist talk will be held in English.
Ramiro Wong (b. 1987, Lima, Peru) is a research-based artist living and working in Vienna. He is interested in translation, representation, and the politics/policies of invisibilization as imprinted and narrativized onto the languages of contemporary art as a system of oppression within a system of oppression. In both its time-based iterations and object-based aftermath, his work is not meant to illustrate a circumstance, but to trigger an action – prompting a conversation in which each participant becomes witness to the experience of the other.
Wong studied at the University of Applied Arts in the transart class with Nita Tandon. His work has been displayed internationally in MALI (Lima), Museum Q’orikancha (Cusco), Belvedere 21 (Vienna), and Dom Museum Wien (Vienna).
Ramiro Wong’s installation inhabits a performative space that evokes one of his earliest childhood memories of the internal armed conflict in Peru from 1989. What have I escaped? Where, anyway, would I go escape?* embodies visual memories triggered by sound, texture, and scent.
However, presenting this artwork within an institution poses its own problems, as Wong’s deeply personal memories and expression thereof are compromised by the constraints of displaying the work in such a space. Safety requirements and bureaucratic measures have secluded the work from the outside world. As a reaction to these forms of censorship, he has decided to present it in a new iteration: surrounded by a cage that keeps outside visitors at a safe distance, but also incapable of fully accessing the dangerous territory – be it practical or emotional – in which the original installation sits.