Kunsthalle Wien

Artists: Diana Barbosa Gil, Cho Beom-Seok, Jojo Gronostay, Ani Gurashvili, Lukas Kaufmann, Nora Severios, Anna Spanlang (with textile sculptures by Sunny Pfalzer), Chin Tsao

Display by Julia Hohenwarter

The Kunsthalle Wien Prize is a cooperation of Kunsthalle Wien with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna

For the first time, the exhibition showcasing the winners of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2021 will take the form of a group presentation, gathering eight artists, who graduated last year either from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna or the University of Applied Arts Vienna: Anna Spanlang and Diana Barbosa Gil – winners of the first prize – as well as Cho Beom-Seok, Jojo Gronostay, Ani Gurashvili, Lukas Kaufmann, Nora Severios, and Chin Tsao.

The prize exhibition has been extended to a larger selection of artists in order to represent a wider spectrum of artistic positions among the graduates of both art academies. The new format privileges the many over the few and the collective over the individual.

The title of the exhibition, Handspells, refers to sequences of gestures performed by bodies or body parts that have performative or transformative effects – expected or unforeseen – on their environment and on other bodies. The works presented reenact or inquire simple, mundane, sometimes repetitive gestures as they appear in the realms of work, of creation, of craft, and in a wide range of other productive but also reproductive activities. When these gestures affect the real, they get imbued with some sort of magic, they become connection, they create relation and can be seen as spells. Handspells also evokes chiromancy, where the inscriptions of gestures, of techniques, of habits, of narratives in the palm become signs that can be interpreted.

The exhibition is about bringing close to each other touch and vision, language and body, magic and labor, and about emphasizing the creative dimension of the ordinary, the transformative dimension of iteration, and the political dimension of sharing body techniques.

The Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2021 is realized with the kind and generous support of the d+g bogner-stiftung and Dekotrend.