4 whales in a soft sponge
There are many reasons why the culinary arts were such an attractive genre for the avant-garde. Cooking is a discipline that is primary sensual: irrationality is allowed, creativity is praised. Culinary arts are controversial: what is considered edible and especially tasty is something that is constantly changing and being brought into question. Cooking and eating are performative: they are and have always been about performing wealth, class, culture, lifestyle. Food is traditional and highly ritualized: a perfect target for an artist wanting to break with conventions of taste and conduct.
4 whales in a soft sponge freely re-interprets the absurdist cookbooks of the avant-garde, setting them in dialogue with contemporary artistic positions. Six artists and artist duos from Vienna appropriate culinary methods into their respective practices ranging from sculpture to performance and digital arts.
Honey & Bunny, Isa Schieche, Mara Novak, Peter Varnai & Margareta Klose, Steffi Parlow, Titania Seidl
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
On view: June 19 – August 8, 2024
Medium Gallery
Hviezdoslavovo nám. 18
Bratislava, Slovakia
exhibition feature in KubaParis
exhibition feature in Artalk
exhibition feature in Artmirror
Dispatches from a Troubled City
Every city, whether real or fictional, is multilayered and contradictory, a constant struggle for validation and coexistence. The exhibition draws parallels between daily life in contemporary Vienna and British author China Miévelle’s novel Perdido Street Station set in the fictional city of New Crobuzon. Using an experimental curatorial approach, seven artistic positions are paired associatively with passages from the book.
From the dangers of advancing technology and the conflicts between multifaceted populations, to subcultures and places of refuge for those on the margins of society, each of the artistic positions examines a particular aspect of life shared by the two cities. Through open air markets, industrial quarters and artistic hangouts, the exhibition takes the viewers on a sightseeing tour of urban wonders.
Aaron Amar Bhamra, Daniela Grabosch, Ordained Hardware, Mario Kiesenhofer, Gašper Kunšič, Anna Paul, Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
On view: December 1, 2022 – March 26, 2023
Wien Museum MUSA
Felderstraße 6–8
Vienna, Austria
interview for Wien Museum Magazin (in German)
exhibition feature in Les Nouveaux Riches
exhibition feature in Scandale Project
exhibition feature in Artmirror
exhibition feature in YYYYMMDD
The Somnambulists
Through the work of contemporary Slovak, Czech and Austrian artists who intentionally chose to leave their artistic comfort zones in favour of more fluid and unpredictable methods, the exhibition searches for new approaches on the border between reality and fiction. Emerging from traditional drawing techniques, but expanding to incorporate objects, spatial installations, soft sculptures or writing, the artworks in the exhibition adopt surrealist methods and accept automatism, intuition, spontaneous recording of gesture and the outcome of chance as legitimate artistic strategies. The project deliberately moves away from rationality towards exploration of personal mythology and elements of fiction in the context of contemporary drawing.
Juraj Bartusz, Hana Frišonsová & Eva Maceková, Daniel Hafner, Šimon Chovan, Eliška Konečná, Pavla Malinová, David Pinkava, Edita Štrajtová & Barbora Volfová, Lukas Thaler
Curated by Nika Kupyrova and Michal Stolarík
On view: June 26 – August 28, 2022
Opening performance by Chiara Bartl-Salvi
(performed by Chiara Bartl-Salvi & Rebecca Rosa Liebing)
Kunstverein Eisenstadt
Joseph-Haydn-Gasse 1
Eisenstadt, Austria
exhibition feature in O FLUXO
exhibition feature in Kuba Paris
exhibition feature in Tzvetnik
exhibition feature in Munchies Art Club
exhibition feature in Artmirror
Your delicious dreaming
… to this day I am struggling to see you in your entirety. A lock of hair; a string of beads; a collarbone, like a proud bird. Trinkets and mementoes, surely, but their materiality challenges my memory of you, and isn’t it why we keep things? To remember? Dried flowers – do people still keep those?
Titania Seidl, Jakob Kolb, Šárka Koudelová
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
On view: November 9 – December 20, 2019
November 23: "Lucky: Act 3"
A performance by Nicholas Hoffman
December 7: KinoKitchen
With Marie Lukáčová, Daniel Hafner, Luke McCreadie and Gerald Zahn
December 20: Concert On Bells (Jakob Kolb) and publication resease
Salon Goldschlag / Goldschlag 70
Goldschlagstraße 70
Vienna, Austria
view documentation and exhibition text
exhibition feature in Blok Magazine
exhibition feature in Daily Lazy
exhibition feature in Artmirror
Hydrobutter
Exhibition explores the wellness-driven lifestyle and proposes its critical inquiry within ethics, economics and ecology. A marketing strategy of ‘green fashion’ promotes natural beauty and going back to basics — yet the artificiality of sustaining this lifestyle in an urban, commercial context makes it a luxury and a status symbol. Three artistic positions on the crossover between photography, visual and media art explore this phenomenon through a connecting theme of water.
Radek Brousil, Daniela Grabosch, Anna Paul
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
Exhibition in the framework of Foto Wien
On view: March 22 – April 12, 2019
GOMO Artspace
Volkertplatz 8
Vienna, Austria
view documentation and exhibition text
exhibition feature in Blok Magazine
exhibition feature in Artmirror
Neverwhere
In photography, any three-dimensional space is essentially fictional. At best, it’s a replica of an image of a space — a second-degree copy of a supposed reality. Working with analogue photography without the intermediate step of a camera, Janine Schranz and Mara Novak abandon the traditional photographer’s quest for a perfect replica to use space directly as their method and their medium.
Mara Novak and Janine Schranz
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
On view: June 15 – August 15, 2017
Galerie Ferdinanda Baumanna
Štěpánská 622/36
Prague, Czech Republic
view documentation and exhibition text
exhibition feature in Artalk.cz
exhibition feature in Footnotes on art
Working Knowledge #2
“Working knowledge” is the term commonly used to identify foreign language proficiency: although enough to ‘work,’ it is often perceived as lacking, not fluent. And yet, the deficiencies of language distort the information intake and lay open the language structure, allowing to see the language in the making.
Julia Amelie, Janine Schranz, Pawel Szostak, Dorothea Trappel, Thomas Wagensommerer, Mara Novak
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
On view: February 28 – March 26, 2017
Galerie AMU
Academy of Performing Arts in Prague
Malostranské náměstí 12
Prague, Czech Republic
view documentation and exhibition text
exhibition feature in Artalk.cz
Working Knowledge #1
According to Sarat Maharaj, in translation “we are confronted with constructions at odds with each other, with their dislocution.” If translation is a game of looking for analogies, how much does the original need to resemble the result?
Julia Amelie, Pawel Szostak, Mara Novak, Jen Noh, Thomas Wagensommerer
Curated by Nika Kupyrova
On view: April 11 – May 27, 2016
Opening performance by Jen Noh
Galerie IG BILDENDE KUNST
Gumpendorfer Straße 10-12
Vienna, Austria
view documentation and exhibition text