(No) Funny Games

Kaorle am Karlsplatz 2026 is a restaging of Margot Pilz’s groundbreaking work, contextualized in a contemporary setting. Back in 1982, as part of the Vienna Festival, Pilz transformed Karlsplatz into a consumer-free beach landscape complete with sand, palm trees, deckchairs, and parasols, staging the public space as a social sculpture. An inflatable whale and whale songs were an early reference to environmental destruction and species extinction. Forty-four years later, the installation returns as a critical commentary on the climate crisis. What once seemed like a utopian dream has become a dystopian reality: melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, disappearing beaches and resource scarcity characterize the present. Kaorle am Karlsplatz 2026 combines escapist lightness with political acuity. The project questions responsibility, inaction, and the exploitation of nature, seeing itself as an open space between criticism, dialogue, and hope.

This project is realized with the kind support of Hengl Mineral GmbH and SSO Garten & Planung GmbH.

With activations by Karlskirche, Kunsthalle Wien, Künstlerhaus Vereinigung, NEST – Neue Staatsoper im Künstlerhaus, Wiener Staatsoper, HOPE Raumlabor @ TU Wien, Wien Museum, Vereinigung bildender Künstler*innen Wiener Secession u. a.

With Karlsplatz Palmtrees, Pia Sirén has created a temporary installation on Karlsplatz consisting of towering palm trees made from lifting platforms, aluminium tubes, and plastic tarpaulins. The work addresses issues of climate change, colonial-influenced images of longing, and the relationship between city and nature. The deliberately artificial construction refers to historical practices of appropriating exotic vegetation in the Global North. At the same time, the palm trees respond to the conditions of a densely populated urban space in which nature is increasingly planned, controlled, and simulated. Sirén views her palm trees not as permanent sculptures, but as spatial gestures—temporary interventions that shift tropical landscapes into an unexpected urban setting. The installation evokes a sense of ambivalence between longing and alienation, revealing how strongly ideas of nature are shaped by media images, memories, and imperial fantasies.

This project is being realized with the kind support of Wiener Stadtwerke.

Since 2009, the artist duo Zheng Mahler has been taking an interdisciplinary approach to their work on the interactions between globalized trade flows, urban infrastructure, and the relationship between humans, nature, and technology. Their work Plague Columns, installed at St. Charles’s Church in Vienna, brings this research-based practice into a specific historical and spatial context. The project focuses on the eastern column of the church, which is covered during restoration work. Zheng Mahler has staged this as a temporary memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic. Built after the end of the Vienna plague epidemic in 1714, St. Charles’s Church stands for the history of epidemics, religious power, and the colonial representation of the Habsburgs. In their work, Zheng Mahler combine the European tradition of the plague column with totemic forms from Hong Kong, addressing anthropocentric worldviews and historical power relations in the process. In doing so, they raise questions about responsibility, memory, and the potential for healing in the relationship between humans and the environment.

This project is being realized with the kind support of Bank Austria.

With Ultrafauna, Dominik Eulberg and Marcin Nowicki have created a sound installation in which bats become active producers of live music. In the Lobau (Donau-Auen National Park), ultrasonic calls from bats are recorded in their natural habitat using highly sensitive microphones, processed digitally in real time and translated into audible sounds. The resulting compositions are transmitted live to a waggon of the Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel for visitors to experience. The system is based on specially developed software that analyses the echolocation signals and interprets them musically via a digital audio environment. Ultrafauna combines ecological research and technology to offer insight into hidden worlds, making the presence of endangered species audible as a dynamic, location-based soundscape in urban space.

This project is realized with the kind support of the Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel and Donau Auen National Park.

At the heart of Eva Seiler’s installation, SPINSTERHOOD, lies the historical relationship between humans and silkworms. In the MQ Art Box, visitors encounter architectural elements reminiscent of attics, looms, and laboratories—spaces in which biological, human, and mechanical bodies are closely intertwined. The silkworm symbolizes working conditions, control, transformation, and the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.

Vienna was a centre of silk production for centuries, with mulberry trees dominating the cityscape in the eighteenth century. Seiler addresses this local context, demonstrating the interdependence of mulberry trees, silkworms, spinners, and machines. SPINSTERHOOD thus addresses the production mania of industrialization, selective breeding, and the standardization of human labour, drawing parallels with today’s productivity logic. The title refers to spinsters and sisterhood, opening up a space for reflection on work, care, and coexistence. Without taking a moral stance, the work encourages us to imagine a fair and cooperative relationship between humans and animals.

A project of the MuseumsQuartier Wien in partnership with the Klima Biennale Wien 2026.

An off-road vehicle stands on a a piece of meadow right next to a busy traffic artery – muddy brown, as if it were completely covered in mud. It is an irritating yet familiar object in an urban space dominated by traffic. 

Maaaaash! is a 1:1 replica of a luxury off-road SUV, which Folke Köbberling modelled directly from the original vehicle. The title of the work – Maaaaash! (to trample, crush, mix) – refers to the production of the material, a bio-based composite developed by the artist herself. Exposed to the elements, the sculpture slowly begins to rot and, unlike the original vehicle, provides space and nutrients for plants and microorganisms.

Folke Köbberling's artistically formulated social criticism is directed against the waste of resources, soil sealing and neoliberal profit-seeking. Maaaaash! is a scathing commentary, a poetic act of protest against the dominance of the automobile and the land consumption of status symbols.

Maaaaash! is a contribution of KÖR Wien (Public Art Vienna) to the Klima Biennale Wien 2026.

The project will be on display in public spaces until the end of July 2027.

Find more information on this project here.

The BIG Casino transforms an everyday place of consumption into a setting for existential decisions. At the heart of a shopping centre, a speculative casino of the future has opened, where the stakes are not money, but resources, privileges, and livelihoods. Climate becomes a currency, risk becomes a habit, and responsibility becomes an act of negotiation. Anna de Carlo’s immersive performance invites the audience to take part in the action. During the twenty-minute performance, boundaries dissolve between play and seriousness, fiction and reality. Mobility, security, and access to water are up for grabs—as is the question of who will win and who will lose. What is usually taken for granted proves fragile. With this performative parlour game, FutureLeaks condenses space, time, and decision-making into a physical experience, making power relations tangible and renegotiating scope for action.

23.04. & 24.04.2026: 12:30–16:20 (latest entrance at 16:00) 

Break: 14:00-15:00

25.04.2026: 10:30–14:20 (latest entrance at 14:00) 

Break: 12:30-13:30

The performances starts every 30 minutes.

Swiss artist duo NEVERCREW (Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni) are collaborating with the Calle Libre festival for street art to create a large-scale, site-specific mural on the facade of a building at Baumgasse 77 in Vienna’s 3rd district. The artists view public space as a central arena for social negotiation, positioning their work where it directly impacts everyday routines and patterns of perception. Against the backdrop of ecological crises, social inequalities, and political tensions, NEVERCREW employs a limited vocabulary of colour and form to create a monumental, surreal-dystopian visual language that initially appears accessible but reveals its critical nature upon closer inspection. Created in direct dialogue with the architecture, neighbourhood, and urban space, the wall work sees itself as a permanently accessible intervention that highlights issues related to responsibility, ecological interventions, and the consequences of human action.

This project is being developed in collaboration with and curated by Calle Libre.

In his staged series, Bolivian photo and video artist River Claure explores the consequences of colonial exploitation and the resilience of Indigenous communities. For his project A cuenta de tres, lo destruimos todo (On the count of three, we destroy everything), Claure reconstructed a true-to-scale model of the Puerta del Sol in Tiwanaku, a central monument of a vanished pre-Columbian culture. 

In a staged performance documented by video and photographs, the gate is carried by children through the Andean highlands, erected, and finally blown up. This playful destruction symbolizes the centuries-long loss of land, knowledge, and the ecological foundations of Indigenous societies. The large-format photographs presented at nine different locations in Vienna address this collective experience by translating it into urban spaces. They encourage reflection on the exploitation of nature and on colonial continuities, while examining how coexistence can be rethought in the aftermath of the supposed ‘end of the world’.

This project is being realized with the kind support of NOVOart.

Romuald Hazoumè’s works combine West African traditions with contemporary ecological, social, and socio-political issues. Drawing on everyday life, his objects bear traces of a shared existence. They are not mere representations, but powerful symbols that transcend their origins and continue to resonate within us. 

For the Klima Biennale Wien, the artist is exhibiting symbols based on the Fâ, a centuries-old system of knowledge and divination practised by Yorùbá-speaking cultures in West Africa and listed as a UNESCO cultural heritage. These symbols serve as valuable tools for navigating life—rooted in a cosmic order and in a metaphysics of natural forces and ancestral knowledge. On the Aspern bridge and the Stuben bridge, they unfold their universal validity in the desire for reflection and orientation for our community. The spiritual and epistemological dimension of these flags, which are a part of the artist’s Fâ series, gives them a meaning that extends far beyond their original context, making them a globally connectable practice of experience and thought. 

ALTER ECO was curated by Alois Herrmann and Kaspar Mühlemann Hartl. A project by museum in progress in collaboration with Klima Biennale Wien 2026.