Annual exhibition program 2020

In 2020 Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, under the artistic direction of Katharina Brandl, explores the status of inaccessible black boxes in society from the perspective of contemporary art. The exhibition DURST focuses on vampirism as a sociological phenomenon—a metaphor of the interpersonal and ecological parasite. Stormy Weather zooms in on the seemingly ephemeral (technological) cloud and its real-world effects, and Life Constantly Escapes examines the reception of Fred Moten’s writings on “blackness” as a thriving energy and ponders artistic approaches to an evasive, resistant life.

In September 2020, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich will award the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance for the 14th time in order to showcase the diversity of performative works by young artists. For further information on the award, deadlines and this year’s international jury members click here.

The winner of the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance will be awarded with EUR 5000 and will present the proposed performance in September 2020 at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich. 

Aside from the exhibition program, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich also offers an extensive public discourse program, guided tours and educational workshops.

DURST
Opening: Tuesdsay, March 31, 2020
Duration: Wednesday, April 1-Saturday, May 16, 2020

Immortality, seduction, violence—the combination of these attributes associated with the figure of the vampire has laid the ground for popular sex & crime stories for centuries. The myth of the blood-sucking creature is firmly anchored in society’s collective desires, fears, and drives. Ever since, the vampire myth has adapted to societal contexts and conditions, along with a changing external appearance (from Nosferatu to Twilight). Secrets, power, sex, fetish, and anarchy are the political as well as aesthetic dimensions of the figure. 

Curated by Alice Wilke, the exhibition DURST (= THIRST) addresses the vampire and his/her enigmatic lifestyle as a fundamental sociocultural phenomenon: When vampirism is defined as the symbolic sucking of energy and resources from other living beings and our environment, the term can also be expanded to parasitic relations and toxic conditions—and doesn’t end with the fascinating character of a living blood-sucking undead. This exhibition stakes out the reception of the vampire myth in contemporary art, which is often conveyed through pop culture, and a broader semantic field that unfolds through the figure of the vampire.

Artists:  Inka ter Haar, Lauren Huret, Céline Manz, Alexandra Meyer, Sarah Rechberger, Katharina Swoboda, Cathrin Ulikowski

Guest Curator: Alice Wilke 

Stormy Weather
Opening: Thursday, June 4, 2020
Duration: Friday, June 5, 2020-Saturday, July 25, 2020 (Kunstraum Niederoesterreich) 
& Sunday, November 29, 2020–Sunday, January 31, 2021 (Centre culturel suisse. Paris) 

Both the metaphor and the reality of the “cloud” are omnipresent in our daily lives. It is not only the place where data are stored but also—by cloud computing, cloud gaming, or cloud streaming—the place where the central functions of computational power and auto-learning artificial intelligence have migrated to. The cloud is not a storage folder—it is our super brain.

The metaphoric imagery of the cloud makes us think of something fleeting; our data become zeros and ones floating across the sky, carried weightlessly by the wind. In reality, these ephemeral visions of data clouds require infrastructures, which are operated (and controlled) by private companies and, at the same time, have direct impacts on the real climate. Hence, talking about clouds, the weather, and weather metaphors is quite topical, and, in the near future, they will not only be subjects of unmotivated small talk. Curated by Katharina Brandl and Claire Hoffmann, the exhibition Stormy Weather showcases works that survey the field between seemingly ephemeral infrastructures (data clouds) and their concrete manifestations in the real world. How do artists interact with the non-human counterpart, the cloud? Do metaphors or the realities of the cloud become affective carriers themselves in their artistic reception?

The project is realised as a cooperation between Centre culturel suisse, Paris and Kunstraum Niederoesterreich. 

Artists: Fragmentin (Laura Perrenoud, David Colombini und Marc Dubois), Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf), Stefan Karrer, Till Langschied, Yein Lee, Marc Lee, Susanna Flock & Leonhard Müllner, Christiane Peschek, Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud

Curators: Katharina Brandl & Claire Hoffmann 

Life Constantly Escapes 
Opening: Thursday, October 1, 2020
Duration: Friday, October 2, 2020-Saturday, November 28, 2020

Theorists, poets, and artists of the Black Radical Tradition as well as queer, feminist, and indigenous voices have been criticising the capitalist modern age as a socio-ecological catastrophe since longer. Amongst the former, Fred Moten, for example, along with Saidiya Hartman or Denise Ferreira da Silva, speaks of blackness as a social power that precedes modernity, opposes and surpasses it. Blackness is irreducibly connected with the coercion and brutality with which it is pursued as the social life and alleged attribute of black people. Herein, modern logic’s violent nature is blatantly obvious. Just like the desire to stipulate existence and draw dividing lines between the self and others, human, world, land, animal kingdom, or nature. Moten, Hortense Spillers, Ferreira da Silva, and indigenous authors radically challenge these notions. They conjure a hereafter of modernity, which—in light of the global state of emergency and conflict—we must urgently devote attention to.

What happens now, when the realm of contemporary art focuses on this hereafter? When it is not organised by the dominant concepts of the world, humans, or subjectivity? This is Ferreira da Silva’s question, and the exhibition Life Constantly Escapes, curated by Andrea Popelka, is dedicated to it. A celebration of what is smouldering and throbbing under the corset of modernity, what comes before its borders and transcends them, what escapes its attacks out of pure necessity and opens a different world in the process. Where alternatives blossoms despite all adversities: a party, a garden, a dance. Where visitors stroll through the space as space, a sculpture becomes part of the body, a sound strokes along the wall and on the skin and stabs into the heart. Where subjects become objects and objects subjects, and within the shared materiality of all those directly and indirectly present a broken beauty emerges.

Guest Curator: Andrea Popelka