Vivian Suter, Margaret Salmon, and Karrabing Film Collective

Vivian Suter: A Stone in The Lake
The Secession’s iconic light-filled main gallery, which opens onto a small park in the rear of the building, would appear to be the ideal setting for a presentation of the painter Vivian Suter’s oeuvre.

The Argentinean-Swiss artist has lived on a former coffee plantation in Panajachel on the shore of Guatemala’s volcano-ringed Lago de Atitlán since the early 1980s, at a far remove from the art world, which for years paid her little attention. More recently, however, she has garnered considerable acclaim and her work has been shown around the world, including, most prominently, at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017).

Her painterly oeuvre reflects a close interplay between art and nature. She works on her imposing paintings both in the studio and in the open air, deliberately exposing her compositions, typically in large formats and bold colors, to the elements.

The exhibition, her first comprehensive institutional presentation in Austria, features around four hundred loose canvases, hanged in the artist’s characteristic style in a dense arrangement on the walls and suspended from the ceiling, creating a situation not unlike the one in which they came into being—amid the lush jungle-like vegetation on the artist’s land.

A door that is open to the park allows air to flow in that stirs the hanging canvases. It also lets in the ambient noise of the immediate surroundings—a blend of the din of traffic and birdsong. A second acoustic component is the fruit of a collaboration between Vivian Suter and her son Frank Wild: for the exhibition, they met in his sound studio to rerecord a song she wrote in the 1980s.

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires in 1949 and raised in Switzerland. She lives in Panajachel, Guatemala.

From June 23 until September 24, 2023, GAMeC—Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, presents Vivian Suter: Home, a complementary solo exhibition curated by Lorenzo Giusti.

From May 5, 2023 to January 7, 2024, mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien will present the exhibition Fantasiefabrik by the artist Elisabeth Wild, the mother of Vivian Suter.

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Curated by Jeanette Pacher

Margaret Salmon: Monument
Margaret Salmon creates films, photographs, and objects that weave together poetry and non-fiction. Often focusing on individuals in their everyday activities, her work captures the minutiae of daily life and infuses them with gentle grandeur, touching upon universal human themes.

In her exhibition Monument, Salmon presents two new complementary film installations that explore questions of masculinity as well as a series of smaller objects and photographs. The 35mm film projection Boy (winter) (2022) portrays various children in Glasgow in the stages of physical and psychological development, from infant to teenager; the second work, Study for a Film About Monuments (2023), displayed as an installation with five monitors, originally shot on 35mm film, focuses on grownup men as well as a series of silent film studies, including a World War I memorial in Penpont, Scotland.

In calm and static black-and-white shots composed in a non-narrative sequential structure, Boy (winter) seeks to limn a different kind of image that resists both the prevailing idea of masculinity and the regime of the gaze and visual representation bound up with it. The scenes are based on an extended process of growing familiarity, observation, and creative collaboration with the subjects, which is essential to Salmon’s realist approach. The works reflect a line of research that has long defined the artist’s feminist practice: the study of gendered dynamics experienced in everyday life and expressed through the body and culture.

Margaret Salmon was born in Suffern, N.Y., in 1975 and lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Curated by Annette Südbeck.

Karrabing Film Collective: They pretending not to see us …
The Karrabing Film Collective is an intergenerational grassroots media group of around thirty Indigenous filmmakers and Elizabeth Povinelli, who has known and worked with Karrabing members and their parents and grandparents for almost forty years. Karrabing lands stretch along the coast from across the Darwin harbor to Anson Bay, Northern Territory. Karrabing’s films reflect their multidimensional relationships with each other, their land, their ancestors, and human and more-than-human life. They tell stories of their fraught relations with the Australian government, the lingering effects of white settler capitalism, repression by the police and authorities, and white Australians’ failure to recognize Indigenous ways of life.

At the Secession’s Graphic Cabinet, the Karrabing Film Collective premières its most recent film, Night Fishing with Ancestors (2023). “The film asks what other history could have been possible if the Europeans had never invaded and Indigenous people and Macassans had continued to trade foods, stories, and other things. We think that would have been a great history. Unfortunately, the Europeans came and they just keep coming, disaster after disaster. Makes your hair stand on end just thinking about it.”(1)

Divided into six chapters with a total running time of just under twenty-five minutes, the film traces an arc from the era before European colonization, illustrated by the amicable exchange with the neighboring Macassans, across Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770 and the traumatic experiences of the Indigenous population brought on by the ensuing colonialism such as massacres, epidemics, and forced displacement, to past gold and diamond rushes and today’s excessive mining and, in the final scenes, the noticeable effects of climate change.

1. Natasha Bigfoot, Katrina Lewis-Bigfoot, Rex Edmunds, Cecilia Lewis, Elizabeth A. Povinelli in conversation in the book published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Curated by Bettina Spörr

Publications
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications. The digital publications are available for free here.

Opening program
Opening: Thursday, April 27, 2023, 7pm
Exhibition talk: Vivian Suter in conversation with Adam Szymczyk, Thursday, April 27, 2023, 5:30pm
(in English)
An event by the Friends of the Secession

Press contact
Julia Kronberger, presse@secession.at
Press preview: Thursday, April 27, 2023, 10am
Press materials: secession.at/presse