This artist talk will trace how my practice moves between research and lived experience, resisting dominant narratives to address questions of power, political violence, and socio-economic inequality. Beginning with concrete historical events tied to the former Yugoslavia, I view them as paradigmatic moments that make visible broader structures: how war, state power, and capital organize society, distribute responsibility, and normalize violence within contemporary conditions of permanent war.

From its inception, the Kyiv Biennial has used site-specificity to protect and politicize the city’s architectural heritage. The presentation will trace the history of the Biennial’s interventions in neglected Soviet modernist landmarks.

In open-world video games, cities and their natural surroundings simulate public space within a secured, algorithmic illusion. This lecture investigates how games construct and control our virtual flânerie, and how artists, gamers, and filmmakers can subvert these rigid digital environments of our corporate reality.

In der surrealen Logik von God’s Entertainment werden Weltbilder und Bildwelten durcheinandergewirbelt und neu zusammengesetzt. So können alltägliche Erlebnisse neu betrachtet werden und dabei eine berauschende Wirkung entfalten.

In his lecture, Michael Kienzer will talk about his work. We invited him to particularly focusing on his project “Ein Kunstraum für Weikendorf“, since the department of site-specific art is currently developing a project there: In 2007, Kienzer transformed the town’s old fire station in Weikendorf into an exhibition space for contemporary art. Since then, every year two artists have been asked to create an exhibition that is shown for several months. Kienzer selected the artists himself up until 2013, after which a jury consisting of local residents was formed. The jury now chooses two artists every year from a list of nominees compiled by the Public Art Lower Austria panel of experts twice every year.

Join us for a conversation with Swiss artist, author, and video essayist Ursula Biemann, whose visionary works focus on the planet’s changing climate and its ecological impact. Grounded in a research-based practice, Ursula Biemann’s videos and installations exhibited in Becoming Earth at MQ Freiraum consider the relationship between politics and the environment across local, global, and planetary contexts.

The Sámi people are Indigenous people living in North Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. What does it mean to be a Sámi filmmaker? How the ongoing colonial reality affects Sámi storytelling and artistic freedom?

Liquid Loft kreiert Performances in enger Verbindung zur Praxis anderer Kunstformen. Über unterschiedliche Formate und Raumkonzepte hinweg entwickeln die Arbeiten darin eine eigenständige kenntliche Formensprache in professioneller tänzerischer Umsetzung. Choreografisches Handeln folgt Interessen, die über den Tanz hinausweisen, bleibt dabei aber immer Choreografie. Interdisziplinärer Austausch verweist nicht allein auf die produktive Differenz der ästhetischen Praxis in den jeweiligen Künsten, sondern schärft vielmehr den Blick für das gesellschaftliche Umfeld, in dem die Künste handeln. Der choreographische Prozess kehrt dabei immer wieder zurück in die Aufführungssituation.

WIR SIND HIER is a digital cartography project claiming remembrance in public space, from city streets to monuments, through the voices and demands of survivors and families of victims of racist and antisemitic violence. As a living archive, it invites users to imagine how remembrance could and should look like today as an active form of resistance and change. By scrolling over the names of victims, users of the platform are given an overview of right-wing extremist attacks and police brutality in Germany and the former GDR within the last 40 years, including cases that have not yet been properly recognized as hate crimes by state and local authorities.

Our practice is grounded in the different backgrounds and interests of our members – architecture, urbanism, humanities, theatre, and science. Together, we look at public and private spaces. We are interested in the underlying assumptions, social rules, and political decisions shaping these spaces and ask: Who is this space for? Which different everyday lives are taking place here? Are they welcome? Who owns the city? And who could be part of its transformation?