Annual program 2024

Kunstraum Niederoesterreich presents its annual exhibition program 2024.

Heartbeats rising 
Climate anxiety, climate change distress, ecological grief—judging by the findings of climate psychology, the ecological crisis affects our psyche, too. More and more people are complaining of anxiety, elevated stress, feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of a looming planetary collapse. Besides climate anxiety, other fears are also raising the pulse of our times: fear of war, fear of pandemics, fear of social decline. The more the world unravels at the seams, the greater the fear; and the greater the fear, the greater the longing for places and constellations that promise stability: heartbeats instead of heartaches.

Under the title “Heartbeats Rising”, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich dedicates its 2024 program to the dynamics between feelings and crisis. In three exhibitions, an extensive live program, and free art mediation formats, we and our collaborators will dare a glimpse into the intoxicating spheres of desire, illuminate adolescence as a phase that unleashes the transformative powers of imagination, and explore the complex entanglements of language and body.

For the 18th time, the Kunstraum awards the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance, the only award for performance art in Austria. Endowed with 5,000 EUR, the prize will be presented on November 22, 2024. You can find more information here.

Bliss, bliss, bliss
March 15–May 4 / Opening: March 14

What strategies do bodies forge to keep going, to find temporary solace or arrive at something like emotional resilience? May we locate a critical potential in the escapist strategies that do succeed in activating our senses, that allow us a temporary feeling of suspension, of being out of world? Together with an intersectional group of artists, Bliss, bliss, bliss tackles questions like these and ventures into the ecstatic, the orgasmic, and the transcendental as potencies to unleash much-needed dreams and imaginaries.

Artists: James Bantone, Laura Gozlan, Leon Höllhumer, P. Staff, Chin Tsao, and others
Curator: Frederike Sperling

All the feels!
June 7–July 27 / Opening: June 6

All the feels! invites us on a trip through the emotional worlds of teenage years. Historically, “the youth” has always been a driving force behind social change. Even today, in times of climate crisis and wars, it is primarily people between 15 and 24 who insist that a different world is possible. The group exhibition focuses on the fragile moments of growing up and investigates their political potential.

Artists: Oska Gutheil, Hannah Neckel, Maruša Sagadin, Molly Soda, Anna Witt, and others
Curator: Nora Mayr

Alice Slyngstad: ​Flare demure
September 6–November 9 / Opening: September 5

A yes is a yes, and no means no. Somebody either “wants more” or not. But what about the language of the body, which tends to be vague and enigmatic? What do the quickened breath, flushed cheeks, the subtle trembling of a body mean? No? Yes? Maybe? In the artist’s first solo exhibition in Austria, Alice Slyngstad illuminates the complex relationship between language and desire. Can we really catch the body’s will with words?

Curator: Frederike Sperling

Symposium 2024: Performance besides Itself. Infra- and Parastructures of a Contemporary Liveness
December 6–7 

What is the relationship between performance art and the institution? How does the institutional set conditions for performance and how do performative practices, in turn, transform the working methods and infrastructures of art institutions? The two-day symposium Performance besides Itself. Infra- and Parastructures of a Contemporary Liveness will address questions like these together with performance curators, theorists, and practitioners.

Curators: Freda Fiala and Frederike Sperling