Opening of the exhibition CRITICAL CONSUMPTION

Micro trends, fashion giants releasing dozens of new collections every year, precarious conditions for textile workers, luxury brands shredding unworn garments, and ecosystems being destroyed by mountains of textile waste: fashion—and the fashion industry—are increasingly coming under the spotlight for their approach to consumption, production processes, and sustainability. With the exhibition CRITICAL CONSUMPTION, the MAK is viewing with a critical eye a sector that is unrivaled in the way it drives consumption, the desire for the new, and rapid change.

For over a year, the MAK Gallery will play host to historical objects, contemporary designs, and artistic approaches that encourage us to contemplate the pressing issues of our age: “What are our clothes worth?” or “Who can afford not to shop?” Our consumption of fashion can be considered a paradigm of the mass consumption of capitalist societies in the Global North.

Das Tandem aus Kunst und Wissenschaft – Christine Eder, Theaterregisseurin und Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Verhaltensbiologin – arbeitet im Rahmen von zwei Projekten zusammen.

At the Collector’s Room we are showing new works from the series GSTETTN by Regina Anzenberger within the frame of the first Klima Biennale Wien.

Gstettn is a place of wilderness and freedom, a plot of land waiting to be used for housing and that has been taken over by nature in the meantime. From 2017 to 2021, Regina Anzenberger set about capturing the essence of this small piece of land just behind the Anker bakery. Flats for 3000 people will be built now, where once the buildings of Europe's largest bread factory stood.

With her photographs, which are painted over, extended by drawings and augmented with found objects, the artist has captured the natural experience of Gstettn in the seven chapters Winter Flowers, Nature Planets, The Illusion of Summer, Native Grounds, The Reconquest of Nature/6 Columns, Snails and Frost. In her works, Regina blurs the boundary between object and reality and takes us on an adventure.

Local houseplants are mostly imported from the eponymous tropical areas and decorate our living spaces. As silent witnesses of colonization, they are continuously multiplied and only manage to thrive because of the particularly warm temperatures inside. After careful observation, the absurdity of the term “houseplant” becomes apparent. No plant is made for a life indoors. Numerous exotic species, when treated with good care, can survive many years, as they nearly grow in the dark. What can we learn from our green housemates? How do they adapt to these inhospitable living conditions? What kind of coping mechanisms will humans require in a world that soon will be one, two or three degree Celsius hotter? Those and other questions, Käthe Hager von Strobele explores in Growing in the Dark.

Living together with camels and their close relatives shapes cultures. It is a source of livelihood for people around the world and part of their cultural identity. In a special exhibition scheduled to begin in 2024, the Weltmuseum Wien will explore the many aspects of life with dromedaries, Bactrian camels, llamas, and alpacas and will examine the effect that these animals, broadly called camelids, have had on the societies of which they are part.

Featuring films, photographs, artworks, and artefacts from the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien, several of which will be on public view for the first time, and with numerous loans from other institutions, the exhibition in six galleries narrates encounters with camelids past, present, and future.

Oliver Ressler’s artistic and activist practice is based on the conviction that social conditions are not given but rather can be changed. For around three decades, Ressler has been focusing on urgent aspects of democracy, the economy, migration, and ecology, highlighting structural causes as well as forms of resistance and possible courses of action. Making social alternatives conceivable is a central motif in his work.

The exhibition Dog Days Bite Back brings together films and photographic works from recent years that address various dimensions of the climate crisis in all its economic, political, and social complexity and intertwine them with international climate justice movements. Ressler thus emphasizes that the effects of climate collapse that can now be felt across the world are linked to systemic failures in climate policy and a long overdue paradigm shift in global economic systems.

For her solo exhibition at Belvedere 21, Angelika Loderer is designing a site-specific installation that uses soil as the common ground, highlighting its ecological, economic, political, and cultural narratives.

An interest in the subterranean and the stories that lurk there, the tension between what is visible and what is hidden, what is ephemeral and what is permanent run like a thread through the work of sculptor Angelika Loderer. For her critical examination of the concept of sculpture with regard to form and authorship, the artist occasionally engages in a creative dialogue with non-human beings whose habitat is the earth: she uses natural caves and passages shaped by animals as molds for casting or incorporates the transformative properties of fungal mycelium to alter and shape materials. The result of this creative process gives rise to a chance-driven and posthumanist coexistence of living beings.

Heat records and extreme weather seem to be the new normal. The Paris Agreement on climate protection, signed in 2015, has de facto failed. Many countries, including Austria, have but inadequately fulfilled their promises to meet the Agreement’s requirements. Against this background, he MAK presents 25 posters on the theme of environmental pollution and climate change by graphic designer, lawyer, and political activist Klaus Staeck (* 1938) in the new format of the MAK Poster Forum.

Dystopian situations with people standing on the edge of an abyss, landscapes devoid of humans, and deserted villages—it takes a second look to realize that these photographs depict crowds of protesters, remains of civilization-related interventions after flood disasters, or traces of fires that have ravaged forests and landscapes. These events did not take place just anywhere on the globe in the past years; they all happened in Germany.

How does light filter our perception? What do icebergs sound like? What does a printout of the chemical composition of water look like?

For her photography project From a Tongue We Are Losing, which is being presented at the Klima Biennale Wien, the artist joined a team of multidisciplinary researchers embarking on a four-month expedition to the ice of the Arctic—a vast white desert in which humans make up only a minute part of the environment.

Winants has developed special techniques to capture the unique light phenomena of this special region. She makes the data tangible and emotionally perceptible, highlighting the interdependence of ecosystems.

vanishing structures. Politics of Disappearance examines the issues and social, political and environmental conditions associated with the disappearance of architecture, landscapes, people and traditions. The artistic and research-based approaches brought together in the exhibition open up different perspectives on local and geopolitical issues and contexts.

In this context, disappearance refers to both gradual processes that often go unnoticed, or are only noticed by a few, and rapid upheavals that result in sudden, immediate and tangible changes. Fading, fading away and disappearing are considered synonymous in the context of the project and are united in vanishing structures. The concept of structure here stands for tangible arrangements such as urban space, existing systems such as the environment or economic cycles, but also for social structures or collective memories that are less tangible but nevertheless affected by the politics of disappearance.

Growing glaciers: Not fiction, but reality. At the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), scientists around Francesca Pellicciotti are researching glaciers that seem to defy global warming. Together with the artists Céline Ducret, Martin Heynen, and Patrick Hari, ISTA explores our complex emotions in times of uncertainty and tells the story of what it means to measure new realities step by step while the world under our feet is changing.

Sticker (Durchm. 25 cm) mit Info und QR-Code bei den Spiegeln in den Toiletten der Klima Biennale Wien Venues laden das Publikum ein, den ersten Hör-Raum des "Großen Welt-Raum-Wegs" ("Badezimmer") in Wien zu erleben. Der Große Welt-Raum-Weg ist ein Projekt im Rahmen der Kulturhauptstadt Salzkammergut Bad Ischl 2024 von Christoph Viscorsum in Zusammenarbeit mit Andreas Hagelüken. www.grosser-welt-raum-weg.info

With ARAPOLIS, the Hamburg-based artist collective Baltic Raw Org is setting up an interactive game at the Kunst Haus Wien (the Game) and an installation at the Festivalareal Nordwestbahnhof (the ARK).

Seit 2021 untersucht das Projekt ProBACH das Potenzial aktiver sowie inaktiver Stadtbäche für stadtklimatische und sozialräumliche Verbesserungen. Angefangen bei wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen für die Reaktivierung vorhandener Stadtbäche bis zur experimentellen Umsetzung im Rahmen der Klimabiennale werden vielfältige Erfahrungen gesammelt.

Im Rahmen der Klima Biennale Wien 2024 erforscht „Wir probieren Bach“ anhand verschiedener Bachtypologien exemplarisch und experimentell Funktions- und Wirkweisen oberflächlicher Fließgewässer. Ein transdisziplinäres Rahmenprogramm begleitet die Installation und ermöglicht eine Zusammenarbeit von Forscher*innen und Besucher*innen. Diese leisten mit „Wir probieren Bach“ einen wichtigen gemeinsamen Beitrag zur Wissensproduktion und zum Verständnis urbaner Bachläufe.

A project by:
Vienna Business Agency and Atelier LUMA, a programme of LUMA Arles

Executive Partner:
Institute of Architectural Design, TU Wien

Principal Partners:
Bäckerei Ströck, Wienerberger AG, Wiener Linien

Exhibition Partner:
Klima Biennale Wien

Design plays a crucial role in the functioning of our consumer society. But the work of designers can also be a key to an ecologically and socially sustainable way of life. DESIGN WITH A PURPOSE shows examples of how design can take responsibility, even though it is a tool that was developed in the course of destroying the planet.

The objects and projects presented by DESIGN WITH A PURPOSE create ways to value materials, energy, and humans without relying on exploitation. They tell stories and create relationships instead of promoting superficial consumption. And they challenge existing systems with fresh solutions – all without losing sight of aesthetics and functionality.

Solutions & Strategies ist eine Kooperationsreihe mit der Universität für angewandte Kunst und der Akademie der bildenden Künste. Die Projekte begannen zum Teil bereits im Wintersemester 2023 und werden während des Biennale Zeitraums umgesetzt. Studierende, Professor*innen und Alumnis der teilnehmenden Klassen haben in dieser Zeit die Möglichkeit, eigene Projekte zu realisieren.

Songs for the Changing Seasons brings together an international group of artists to reflect on the myriad ways, at once concrete and poetic, in which art is addressing the realities, effects and consequences of planetary transformation. Songs for the Changing Seasons considers forms of love, attention, repair and grief that meet with ecological challenges and damages. Assuming environmental transformation as a reality, the exhibition looks at where, when and how trouble is felt and expressed, and how art offers vital ways to articulate, interpret and cope with this trouble.

The "Climate Biennale Pavilion" invites visitors to an open exchange of ideas and to linger. It is a meeting place, a starting point for many of the programme's events and a place for discussion: this is where climate culture is discussed, negotiated and practised. A weatherproof textile roof makes it possible to use the open pavilion even in bad weather for small events (about 100 people) such as discussions or performances. The pavilion is not an enclosed space, but comes into contact with the existing courtyard, embedding itself in the existing vegetation and allowing it to be experienced from a new perspective.

The existing vegetation in the courtyard of KunstHausWien, which runs along the edge of the perimeter walls in planting beds, is complemented and extended by a dense, forest-like underplanting. This densification increases the climatic performance, which enhances the quality of the stay, especially for events in early summer.

The wooden pavilion is a reuse of part of the Climate Culture Pavilion that was built by the Breathe Earth Collective in Graz in 2021. The installation has already successfully provided important impulses for climate culture. The concept of reusing an existing wooden structure plays a key role in the context of a sustainable climate debate.

Um die drängenden Zukunftsfragen konkret und wirkungsvoll angehen zu können, braucht es ganzheitliche Herangehensweisen. In der künftigen „Wiener Schule für Kunst und Nachhaltigkeit“ wollen wir über künstlerisches Arbeiten mit der Methode der ARTIZIPATION einen Transformationsprozess von einer linearen Denk- und Handlungsweise zu einer zirkulären erproben und so einen dauerhaften Prozess hin zu ökologisch, ökonomisch und sozial nachhaltigem Handeln anregen.


In association with Klima Biennale Wien, KUNST HAUS WIEN presents a comprehensive group exhibition on one of the world’s most vital ecosystems: the forest. Sixteen contemporary artistic positions reflect on the forest as a habitat, its ecological processes, as well as the threats it faces.

More than ever, the world’s forests have become monuments to the imbalances found on our planet. Forests filter water and air, and supply resources and food. As habitats for the majority of terrestrial animals, forests are beneficial to human health, and, as vital carbon stores, help stabilize the planet’s climate. Logging and the profit-oriented exploitation of woodlands are accelerating the ecological crisis while climate change fuels deforestation.

Because of global warming and its consequences, our gaze is increasingly directed downwards. Without the creatures under our feet, the ground would be pulled away from us. Now we want to get to know them and their fins and feelers, flagella and tentacles, bubbles and barbels! But does our attention help them? We should definitely not mess with them: From beneath you it devours! We? Those below us make that questionable to us. Because speaking of climate means giving up the fiction of being able to stay below.

Die Wiener Schule für Kunst und Nachhaltigkeit bündelt Wissen und Praxiserfahrung aus Kunst, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft, um neue Lösungen für die zukünftigen Herausforderungen anzubieten. Prototypisch werden im Rahmen des Projekts gemeinsame Strategien zur Umkehrung der vorherrschenden linearen Denk- und Handlungsweise in eine zirkuläre entwickelt. In alltagspraktischen Workshops können Ankerpraktiken für den sozialen, ökologischen und ökonomischen Wandel erprobt werden.

How do the artists showcased in this exhibition integrate environmental responsibility into their art practices centered on ecology? How can concerns regarding sustainability and ecological issues be effectively incorporated into both the theoretical and practical dimensions of art? Furthermore, the discussion will delve into contemporary art's approaches to nature and ecology, with a primary focus on the works spanning various disciplines. These artists convey direct messages concerning environmental issues or provoke contemplation on sustainability through their creative endeavors.

„WILDERNESS ALLIANCES — Exhibition & Laboratory for Artistic and Performative Research in Interaction with Plants“ is a MOTHERBOARD project that explores the relationship between humans, plants, and other vibrant entities. It is an immersive installation inspired by Hildegard von Bingen's concept of Viriditas - The Greening Power, composed of various plants, seeds, soil, and video works, responding to current environmental challenges. The exhibition creates a space for artists, visitors, and plants to explore diverse relationships within social, ecological, and political structures, encouraging new narratives within our interconnectedness with our home planet.

Artists: Guadalupe Aldrete, Bettina Eigner, Fuzzy Earth, Anita Fuchs, Elena Kristofor, Barbara Marcel, Laura Sperl, Stephanie Winter & Salon Hybrid

Curated by Stephanie Winter

Research by Linn Mauerer

Showroom of the Red Carpet Art Awards: Exhibition of the school HTL Rennweg, Vienna

The Vdonaukanal art mile presents artistic interventions outside of museums and historical institutions and is becoming a new, expanded meeting place for interactive art in Vienna.

Vdonaukanal presents art education projects in augmented reality and thus the art of the next generation. Through this power of creative research, the Danube Canal will be transformed into a space of renewal and discourse.

This exhibition is a project jointly undertaken by the Weltmuseum Wien (WMW) and the private Museu de Arte Indígena (MAI) in Curitiba, Brazil. The show’s curators, Claudia Augustat (WMW) and Julianna Polodan Martins (MAI), engage these two museum collections in dialogue, reflecting thereby the manner in which autonomous works of art have evolved from functional and ritual objects.

Showroom of the Red Carpet Art Awards: Exhibition of the Parhamergymnasium, Vienna

Together with three Viennese darkrooms – the photo lab Lumen X, the workshop Analog Photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and filmkoop wien – the Photo Gallery Vienna explores alternative photographic processes. The exhibition showcases local artists who pave the way for resource-saving practices. As part of workshops, the audience is also invited to experiment with alternative imaging techniques and development methods.

In an immersive spatial installation specially conceived for the MAK, the artist collective Troika (Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastian Noel) focuses on the multi-layered forms of non-human intelligence. While in the digital animation "Terminal Beach" a robotic arm covered in fur fells the last tree on earth, the scenography is expanded into the real space by 3D-printed digital twins of museum objects that populate a flooded landscape as enigmatic creatures.

In an immersive spatial installation specially conceived for the MAK, the artist collective Troika (Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastian Noel) focuses on the multi-layered forms of non-human intelligence. While in the digital animation "Terminal Beach" a robotic arm covered in fur fells the last tree on earth, the scenography is expanded into the real space by 3D-printed digital twins of museum objects that populate a flooded landscape as enigmatic creatures.

Since 2020, the global stock of man-made mass has been higher than that of biomass. In order to gain perspectives on sustainable relationships with inanimate matter, a Gründerzeit building and the Prater Bridge over the Danube (A23) were scientifically decomposed in terms of their building materials and recomposed as literary and sculptural speculations. The result is imaginary images with a time horizon ranging from the present to geological distances.

Kubus is a participatory exhibition and discussion format developed by the artists Anke Armandi, Maria Grün, and Lena Knilli. Kubus III, with works by Michael Goldgruber and Markus Guschelbauer, is the starting point for an Open Call: People from artistic practice are invited to respond to it with works by other artists, to supplement the exhibition in the Factory of the Künstlerhaus and to expand the space for dialogue.

Energy is a scientific concept, but also part of discourse, and deeply related to power structures. To borrow a term from Donna Haraway, it is part of the “natureculture” of the modern world; it can be studied historically while it is part of natural complexity, and a description of a scalar physical quantity that can be measured, transformed and transferred. Entangled in the physical and the political, thermodynamic and metabolic, geologic and corporeal, extractive and renewable, landscapes and bodies, energy remains one part of the modern world that is particularly abstract and obscure.

Visualizations of energy, past and present, are critical as they translate scientific research and data into other fields, displaying the entanglements of energy. They have the potential to become signs by bringing together the signifier, the signified and the perceiver. In such images, scientific knowledge and aesthetics go hand in hand, and energy enters the threshold of the visible world.

Indeed, already in the 7th century, Isidore of Seville suggested the entanglements of energy, when he wrote that the words color and “calor” (heat) come from the same root in his Etymologies. In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell’s insights on the nature of electromagnetic waves showed the difference between light and heat to be a wave’s frequency. It is possible to think about the relation between aesthetics and energy, and ask: what color is energy today, for this society and culture?

This exhibition brings together the historical visualizations of energy along with the work of artists and architects thinking about the colors, images and representations of energy.

With works by Hubert Dobler, Exikon, Barbara Kapusta, Matthias Kessler, Galo Patricio Moncayo-Asan and Michael Wang.
The exhibition was conceptualized and organized by Tülay Atak and Bernhard Sommer with Galo Patricio Mancayo-Asan, Malgorzata Sommer-Nawara, Florian Zeif, Daniil Zhiltsov, and graphic design by Annija Česka.
The exhibition has been made possible with an INTRA grant, funded by the Zentrum Fokus Forschung at the Angewandte.

Showroom der Red Carpet Art Awards: Ausstellung der Schüler*innen des GRG 23 Draschestraße 1230