Salon der Angst

Fear and anxiety are familiar to all. Salon der Angst at the Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier will not only focus on generalised feelings of insecurity and threat, but also on how culture shapes both individual and collective experiences of fear and fearful events. Depictions of fear, terror, and the distraught are well-tread in art history, but also characterize a younger generation’s artistic practice that responds to a contemporary society rife with new and specific fears and insecurities.

The exhibition Salon der Angst explores the artistic confrontation with the fears of our time across a broad affective and socio-political spectrum. Fear is here understood as a response to those aspects of the present that we do not know how to deal with it. The artists in this exhibition address these fears in terms of a history of ideas, but also their specific psychological manifestations. The preoccupation with fear and anxiety in art therefore turns out to be an exacting look at the treatment (and production) through the media of a human emotion at once both familiar and elusive.

Participating artists: Nel Aerts, Özlem Altin, Kader Attia, Gerard Byrne, Los Carpinteros, James Ensor, Ieva Epnere, Harun Farocki, Marina Faust, Didier Faustino, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Rainer Ganahl, Agnès Geoffray, Thomas Hirschhorn, Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange, Cameron Jamie, Jesse Jones, Dorota Jurczak, Ferdinand van Kessel, Bouchra Khalili, Eva Kotátková, Nicolas Kozakis / Raoul Vaneigem, Alfred Kubin, Erik van Lieshout, Jen Liu, Marko Lulić, Fabian Marti, Florin Mitroi, Marcel Odenbach, Jane Ostermann-Petersen, Francis Picabia, Willem de Rooij, Allan Sekula, Zin Taylor, Noam Toran, Kerry Tribe, Peter Wächtler, Jeff Wall, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Tobias Zielony

Curators: Nicolaus Schafhausen and Cathérine Hug