After two decades, Austrian artist and filmmaker Josef Dabernig returns to Grazer Kunstverein. The exhibition revolves around the Austrian premiere of his latest film, Lacrimosa (2024), which stages funeral ceremonies in the attic of a spooky villa. In the film, an elderly aunt gathers her great-grandnieces and great-grandnephew around a child’s coffin for a funeral prayer. Folded hands, furtive glances, rosaries, and a commode chair are the elements of an eccentric children’s game in which the illustrious group navigates between intimidation, rebellion, and a dangerous staircase, all while grappling with existential questions.

Lacrimosa sets the tone for a retrospective look at Dabernig’s moving-image oeuvre, filtered through the motifs of death, mourning, and elegy. The relation between the film and the scenography is conceived as an expanded form of sculpture, shaping the interplay of artifact, domesticity, and loss.

JOSEF DABERNIG (b. Kötschach-Mauthen, Austria) is an artist and filmmaker living in Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include Lancia Thema, The Black Box, Wschód, New York, USA (2023); Wisla, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark (2023); and Equally Not Nothing, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems, Austria (2020). Dabernig’s work was a part of the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2003, Manifesta 3 (2000, Ljubljana) and 10 (2014, St. Petersburg), and the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012). His films have been featured across various film festivals internationally, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2004, Dabernig presented his exhibition Josef Dabernig: Proposal for a New Kunsthaus, not further developed at Grazer Kunstverein, which was accompanied by a namesake publication.

A co-operation with steirischer herbst ’24

You wrote: the title of his exhibition is the collection of images that accompanies it. Three images of a red eye, split, side by side.

You said that the first image, a red shape against a grey backdrop, felt familiar but resisted identification. You told me that it reminds you of an eye, vigilant and watchful, intertwined with the sharpness of a pointer, guiding. 

You wrote: this image is like a half-memory, in a haze, details softened, an invitation to ponder its secrets.

In the second image, you told me, similar shapes appear. The eye and arrow merge in their enigmatic pull, centered on the screen, details blurred at the edges, as if the lens was smudged. You wondered if it is a twin to the first piece, and whether this suggests that clarity is not always necessary for understanding. Is this movement a suggestion, a gentle nudge towards meaning?

You wrote: the quality of these images will draw you towards a mysterious dance.

The third image, you said, will stand with bold clarity once the blur is mostly lifted to reveal the design. The red lines will be crisp against a brownish-white background, the eye’s form will be distinct, the cursor’s thrust confident and unwavering. You said you will want the image to speak with a clear voice, as its symbolism becomes unmistakable: the fusion of vision and direction, perception and purpose. 

You wrote: this image will crystallize what the others hinted at.

These three images, like his exhibition, did not use words. You wrote that the images themselves generated language. That they served as a premonition of something not yet realized. You said that you had heard songs of green and yellow and silver and the smell of camphor. And in that absence of words, we tried to make images speak.

The exhibition is curated by Tom Engels and will be accompanied by a publication developed by Jason Dodge, Julie Peeters, and Tom Engels.

On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening, as well as the joint openings at Halle für Kunst Steiermark and Neue Galerie Graz, a shuttle bus from and back to Vienna will be provided. 

Departure Vienna: 2:00 pm, Operngasse 4, Buszone, Wiener Staatsoper
Return 10:00 pm, Burgring 2, Halle für Kunst Steiermark

More information can be obtained by emailing office@grazerkunstverein.org.

JASON DODGE recently presented the solo exhibitions Tomorrow, I Walked to a Dark Black Star at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Cut a Door in the Wolf at MACRO, Rome (2021); and They Lifted Me into the Sun and Packed My Empty Skull in Cinnamon, a six-part exhibition held at Akwa Ibom, Athens; Guimarães, Vienna; MOREpublishers with Gevaert Editions, Brussels; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; and Gern en Regalia, New York (2020). In 2014, he curated Ronald Jones: 1987–1992 at the Grazer Kunstverein in collaboration with Krist Gruijthuijsen, its former artistic director, which was accompanied by Ronald Jones, a publication published by Grazer Kunstverein and Motto Books. Dodge founded and continues to edit the poetry imprint fivehundred places, and lives on the island of Møn in Denmark.

Curtis Cuffie’s New York City is an exhibition of photographs on the public art of Curtis Cuffie. 

Curtis Cuffie was a public figure in the East Village until his death, in 2002, at the age of forty-seven. By the time of his passing, Cuffie had published hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mysterious, improbable artworks on the streets of New York. To do so, he would fish the city’s leftovers and dress it in riotous assemblages made of discarded objects, fabrics, and ordinary things that speak of what we are. Such works had little by way of finish: things came and went, materials were adjusted and altered, and pieces were regularly destroyed by the Department of Sanitation and the police. Little of it survived. Consequently, viewing Cuffie’s sculpture today typically involves a second-hand encounter, filtered through the perspectives of those who photographed it, be they friends or lovers, fellow artists, or unknown passersby. 

Curtis Cuffie’s New York City presents the art of Curtis Cuffie as it was photographed by Katy Abel, Tom Warren, and Cuffie himself. Comprising some seven hundred photographs from the 1990s, the exhibition is brought to life through a number of analogue slide projectors, presenting three distinct registers of imagery: Abel’s use of vibrant colors, Warren’s stark, almost reportorial black and white pictures, and Cuffie’s own dynamic, abstract, and sometimes shattered photographic compositions. These pictures, emerging and fading from view, generate a palpable sense of movement and transience in keeping with the nature of Cuffie’s art and the city it found itself in.

Curtis Cuffie’s New York City is accompanied by a publication of the same name, featuring a selection of Cuffie’s color and black and white photographs, edited by Tom Engels and designed by Julie Peeters. 

Curtis Cuffie’s New York City is curated by Tom Engels in collaboration with Robert Snowden. The exhibition is realized through the invaluable support of Carol Thompson, who maintains the Curtis Cuffie archive, alongside the generous contributions of Katy Abel and Tom Warren.

CURTIS CUFFIE (1955–2002) was an artist based in New York City’s East Village. Originally from Hartsville, South Carolina, he moved to Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and eventually settled in Manhattan, first near Bryant Park and later around the Bowery where he lived unhoused for long stretches of his life. Artforum, The New York Times, and The Village Voice all profiled and reviewed his work and he held solo exhibitions at Flamingo East, Tribes, and 4th Street Photo Gallery, all in New York. During his lifetime, Cuffie was featured in nearly a dozen group shows across the US at various venues including Exit Art, American Primitive, and the Jamaica Art Center in New York, as well as the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Cuffie was integral to a dynamic circle of artists and intellectuals, marking his place within New York’s black avant-garde. Recently, his work has been presented in exhibitions across New York City, including Souls Grown Diaspora (2020) at Apexart, curated by Sam Gordon; Greater New York (2021) at MoMA PS1, curated by Ruba Katrib; and Curtis Cuffie (2023) at Galerie Buchholz, curated by Scott Portnoy. Curtis Cuffie, a book edited by Scott Portnoy, Robert Snowden, and Ciarán Finlayson, and designed by Julie Peeters, was published by Blank Forms in 2023.

The Weight of the Concrete marks the first monographic exhibition of Ezio Gribaudo (Turin, 1929-2022) in Austria. It serves as a comprehensive homage to his multifaceted career, offering an extensive exploration of his roles as both artist and publisher. The exhibition borrows its name from Il Peso del Concreto (1968), a seminal book that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic work alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola. In line with his interdisciplinary approach, this exhibition explores Gribaudo’s idiosyncratic oeuvre, his poetics of matter, and the complex relationship he developed between image and language. Gribaudo’s work is then carried into the present by a scenography designed by the Italian artist Davide Stucchi. The exhibition is curated by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal.

At the center of The Weight of the Concrete are the Logogrifi, Gribaudo’s emblematic series that he developed from the 1960s onward. Throughout his life, the Logogrifi have articulated a deep entanglement with his activities as a bookmaker, as well as his fascination for new industrial printing processes, typefaces, language games, and relief matrices. Grounded in linguistic or visual riddles, the Logogrifi are akin to logogriphs or puzzles that involve the formation of new words by permuting their initial letter. In Gribaudo’s interpretation, a Logogrifo oscillates between legibility and abstraction, at times verging toward readable forms and at others scaling the enigmatic world where image and language coalesce.

The Weight of the Concrete explores Gribaudo’s distinct poetic repertoire of forms—encompassing textual, figurative, and topographic elements, yet invariably disconnected from their provenance—which heralds the emergence of a new grammar and, consequently, novel forms of reading. Starting with achromatic embossments on blotting paper, transforming into wooden and polystyrene reliefs, and ultimately culminating in vividly chromatic pieces using typographic ink, the works persistently interrogate the ways in which form, language, and matter continue to shape and redefine one another. This transformation not only challenges traditional modalities of readership and perception, but also progressively slows down and intensifies the viewer’s experience, moving it from an exercise in deciphering the achromatic nature of the page to a vibrant and colorful encounter. This relentless experiment with printing technologies was sparked by his dedication to publishing artist monographs, featuring contemporaries such as Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, and Wifredo Lam, as well as his interest in popular print formats like newspapers, dictionaries, atlases, and children’s books. To emphasize this non-hierarchical relationship between his artistic work and publishing activities, the exhibition’s final chapter presents a unique selection of Gribaudo’s rare publications and archival materials.

The Weight of the Concrete gathers these graphic and poetic operations with the support of Davide Stucchi’s spontaneous gestures and conceptual responses. Drawing from Stucchi’s longstanding practice of using ready-made objects and industrially produced materials, his scenography reflects a mutual fascination for the industrial reproduction and repurposing of standardized materials. Operating at the intersection of visual arts, design, fashion, and scenography, Stucchi’s interventions echo and amplify Gribaudo’s interdisciplinary body of work. 

The Weight of the Concrete will be complemented by two namesake publications. The first, which will be released alongside the opening at Grazer Kunstverein, will showcase photographic excerpts from Gribaudo’s achromatic embossed Logogrifi books (1965-1972), uniquely complemented with an intervention by Stucchi. The second publication reflects the editorial premise of Gribaudo’s and Spatola’s Il Peso del Concreto (1968). It revisits and reimagines this publication and the archive of its making, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry. It will also include essays elucidating the interplay between language, matter, and their poetic interconnections. Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein, it is scheduled for release in the summer of 2024.

The Weight of the Concrete will also feature a sound program, The Weight of the Tongue, which serves as a speculative prelude to the upcoming publication. Focusing on the vocalization of experimental poetry, the program will gather the voices of Tomaso Binga, CAConrad, Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Hanne Lippard, and Patrizia Vicinelli. Additionally, Katalin Ladik, Bryana Fritz, and Nat Marcus will contribute to the program and perform their work at the opening of the exhibition.

An additional public program, taking place in early 2024, will delve into the intrinsic relationship between concrete poetry, publishing, graphic design, typeface, feminism, and performative practices. Contributors to this program include Mónica de la Torre, Alex Balgiu, Andrea di Serego Alighieri, and others.

The public program and the publications are curated and edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal.

EZIO GRIBAUDO (1929-2022, Italy) was an artist and art publisher based in Turin. Gribaudo’s work, notable for its fusion of figurative, textual, and topographical elements, was shaped by his expertise in typography, industrial printing, and publishing. He managed the Edizione d’Arte Fratelli Pozzo publishing house and was instrumental in the Le Grandi Monografie series by Fabbri Editori, producing monographs on artists such as Karel Appel, Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Antoni Tàpies, among others. In collaboration with Michel Tapié, he contributed to the ICAR (International Center of Aesthetic Research) in 1960. Gribaudo was also committed to curatorial projects, such as the exhibition of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, in 1976, and Jean Dubuffet’s exhibition-performance CouCou Bazar at Promotrice delle Belle Arti with FIAT in 1978.

Ezio Gribaudo’s artistic trajectory is characterized by a prolific exhibition history. His work has been featured in exhibitions both in Italy and internationally since the late 1950s and continues to be exhibited to this day. A small selection of solo exhibitions includes: Galleria d’Arte La Bussola, Turin (1959); Galleria Schwarz, Milan (1967/1972); Galleria la Bertesca, Genoa (1967); Galleria Viotti, Turin (1968); Galerie de France, Paris (1968); Kunstverein Göttingen (1971); Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne, Geneva (1971); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (1973); Marlborough Graphics Gallery, London (1974); Galleria Michaud, Florence (1975); Etablissement d’en face, Brussels (2019); and Galerie Sans Titre, Paris (2022).

In addition, Gribaudo participated in significant exhibitions such as the 9th Rome Quadriennale (1965); the 33rd Venice Biennale (1966); Salon de Mai, Paris (1967); Salon de Mayo, Havana (1967); the 9th São Paulo Art Biennial (1967); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1967); GAM (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna), Turin (1967); Salon de Mai, Paris (1968); Museum of Modern Art, Caracas (1968); The National Gallery, Prague (1969); the 8th International Exhibition of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (1969); the 10th Rome Quadriennale (1973); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (1979); International Exhibition of Graphic Arts, Bilbao (1982); Grand Palais, Paris (1982); Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli (1986); the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin (2015); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2016); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2017); GAM (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna), Turin (2017); Pio Pico Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2021).

DAVIDE STUCCHI (b. 1988, Italy) lives and works in Milan. He works at the intersection of visual art, fashion, advertising, scenography, and domesticity, exploring pre-existing materials through minimal gestures and interventions. With a conceptual and poetic approach, Stucchi creates installations and sculptures that reveal absent bodies and intimate stories through the tangibility and vulnerability of the objects. His recent solo exhibitions include Clin d’oeil, with Luisa Gardini, Ermes Ermes, Rome (2022); Falli (Phalluses), Martina Simeti, Milan (2021); DS, Deborah Schamoni, Munich (2020); 2546/9728, Sundogs, Paris (2019); Davide Stucchi con Corrado Levi, zazà, Naples (2019); and Light switch (Entrance), Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2019), among others. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, Paris (2023); Between Bridges, Berlin (2023); Palazzo Ducale, Genoa (2023); Marsèll, Milan (2022); Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2021); MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2020); the 17th Rome Quadriennale, Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Stadtgalerie Bern (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2017); the 16th Rome Quadriennale, Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome (2016), among others. Since 2017, Stucchi has been active as a set designer for various fashion labels, culminating in his latest collaboration with Magliano since 2021.

The Weight of the Concrete is realized in collaboration with Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, where it will be on view from March 23 to September 1, 2024, and with the Archivio Gribaudo in Turin, Italy.

The project is supported by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.

In Until Due Time, Everything Is Else, Pan Daijing crafts an evocative exploration of temporality, memory, and presence. Through an interplay of video, traces of performance, site-specific interventions, and sound, the exhibition delves into the impermanent and fleeting dimensions that shape her understanding of performance — a perception that might parallel existence itself.

Pan Daijing’s work typically thrives in the realm of the live, manifesting itself through durational performative situations, inhabited installations, concerts, and other intimate encounters with audiences. Until Due Time, Everything Is Else introduces a counterpoint: all elements of liveness are stripped away. Instead of witnessing the dynamism of bodies in space or the throbbing pulse of live sound, visitors encounter only the echoes of such occurrences. Suggestions of presence are enveloped, hinted at, or harnessed by the exhibited works, and imbued with the vitality of what once was or what is to come.

Until Due Time, Everything Is Else gathers works of an ambiguous nature, as they mark the presence of something else, something that is not-here and not-now. They stand as materials crafted in moments of anticipation, as remnants from those very animate experiences, or as bearers of the procedural and intuitive displacements that happen when moving from one medium to another.

Reaching beyond the registers of performance documentation, these works are containers imprinted by transformative moments, and so embody or forecast change. As such, the exhibition directly confronts the paradox of the trace, which suggests that in attempting to capture or preserve an instance, one inadvertently alters or distorts its origins. Daijing’s pieces are a meditation on this paradox, emphasizing that traces, whether in memory or art or life, are both revealing and concealing, capturing both past and future whilst simultaneously eluding complete comprehension. 

Until Due Time, Everything Is Else is complemented by a publication of the same name, which extends Pan Daijing’s exhibited multi-channel video installation to paper. It is edited by Tom Engels and designed by Julie Peeters.

Until Due Time, Everything Is Else is Pan Daijing’s first institutional exhibition in Austria and is curated by Tom Engels. 

Pan Daijing (b. 1991, Guiyang, lives in Berlin) has shown her work internationally at the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); the Louvre, Paris (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Tate Modern, London (2019); and the Biennale of Moving Image, Geneva (2018), among others. In 2024, Pan Daijing will present a solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich and, as the recipient of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, will exhibit at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has performed at numerous venues and festivals including the Barbican Centre, London; Kraftwerk, Berlin; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; Berghain, Berlin; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and the National Pantheon, Lisbon. She has released three full-length albums: Tissues (2022), Jade (2021), and Lack (2017).

The exhibition is supported by ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and is a cooperation in the context of steirischer herbst ’23.

If green is elemental, terrestrial, fundamentally of the earth—sharp blade of the palm, soft chorus of the grass, superabundance—it is also thoroughly modern. Green screen, chroma key, green as a ghost. Neon, billboard, bleeding light. What green did she see?

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously (2023) is a newly commissioned video essay and installation by the Bosnian-Dutch artist Miloš Trakilović that explores visibility and freedom in the digital age through the lens of his family history. The work is rooted in the account of his mother, Milijana Mendeš, who survived the atrocities of the Bosnian War and fled to the Netherlands with her two children in 1995. In 2018, Trakilović conducted an extensive interview with her about her experiences from the Bosnian War. In this conversation, she vividly recalls some of her first moments once outside of the war zone: “When I arrived in The Netherlands as a refugee, the first thing I remember doing was sitting in a park for hours. I could not stop staring at the grass. It was so lush and green. I’ve seen grass many times in my life before, but I’ve never again seen it so bright. I remember sitting there and thinking; this grass here is so green, it is free, and in that moment, I felt free too. I felt liberated from my past.” 

Twenty-eight years after their arrival, Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously embodies Trakilović’s speculative quest to make his mother see that same shade of green once more. Trakilović entwines her heartfelt triangulation between green, grass, and freedom with the coded and simulative nature of digital technologies in which green plays an imperative role, such as the green screen or chroma key, and computer-generated imagery. Filmed in the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and oscillating between simulated and “real” landscapes, Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously unfolds as an inquisitive and poetic dream sequence that challenges the hegemonic role of vision and truth in the narratives of war and visual culture at large. Here, Trakilović invokes the invisible, unrelenting spectral forces that constitute the experience and memory of war and its aftermath.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously will be presented alongside All But War Is Simulation (2020), a two-channel video installation that explores representations of violence and the visualization and mediatization of warfare in an age of digital expansion. Blending historical record with speculation and theory, it takes as its starting point an artifact from the Bosnian War: a soon-to-be refugee’s Post-It note detailing a list of possessions to be taken before the family’s eviction. All of the items are related in some way to the preservation of memory—highlighting both the longing for an ideal past and a boundedness to the everyday experiences of war, where survival becomes routine and one’s life is reduced to a few simple objects. Neither an image nor a poem, the yellow record speaks to the multiple dimensions of loss associated with the experience of war and displacement.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously is accompanied by a publication of the same name, with contributions by Edwin Nasr, Jelena Petrović, and Miloš Trakilović. It is edited by Tom Engels and designed by Julie Peeters.

Miloš Trakilović (b. 1989, SFR Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Berlin. Recent exhibitions include All But War Is Simulation, Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2021), and Callie’s in collaboration with FRAGILE, Berlin (2020); Things we sense about each other, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2021); ISKRA DELTA: MGLC 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2021); Perception of Contemporaneity, Danube Dialogues, Novi Sad (2019); Farocki Now: A Temporary Academy, Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin (2017); and The Clouds is Where We Want To Be, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017), among others. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE (2019), a video installation developed in collaboration with Hito Steyerl and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze was presented at Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2023), MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), Seoul (2022), MUNCH Triennale, Oslo (2022), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2020), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020), and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2019). Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously is his first institutional solo presentation in Austria.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously is commissioned by Grazer Kunstverein and realized with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund, Dommering Foundation, and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. The exhibition is supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and Stichting Stokroos.

sekretas (Lithuanian for secret) is an exhibition by Marija Olšauskaitė that peers into her long-standing affinity with the glares of glass. It focuses on a particular facet of her work that is attentive to the ways in which sculptural practice and the social lean into one another.

sekretas assembles suspended surfaces to look through, resting vessels to hold, vividly colored benches to carry, a vitreous pond, hand-blown tableware, reproductions of flowers in so far as the logic of glass permits, words jotted in notebooks, plants picked in Uzbekistan, and the company of friends and neighbors to keep.

sekretas borrows its name from an urban leisure activity practiced by youngsters in Lithuania and many other countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. Zestfully, children would enter a courtyard and place small objects under a pane or a found shard of glass: flower petals, golden bottle caps, shells, beautiful rubbish, and other idiosyncratic elements to be organized and composed into material expressions of friendship. The glass would then be covered with soil or dust, as a sekretas recedes from view. A fortunate passer-by or friend on the lookout might then find these secrets, these minute compositions of mundane, seemingly nonsensical elements, which would carry the greatest meaning for those who knew.

sekretas looks into that joint where sculpture, composition, and the making of social bonds revel in each other’s presence. Here, glass takes on a distinct role. It frames and shelters composition and friendship, both concretely and symbolically, while simultaneously prefiguring their fragility and potential shattering.

sekretas presents works that are imbued with a whimsical and slippery attitude toward the fixity of sculpture. They quiver between traditions of craft and ornament, the social role of sculpture, and the ways in which objects populate daily lives and customs. At the same time, Olšauskaitė’s pieces also harbor the idiosyncrasies of cryptic abstraction and enigmatic composition. Throughout her work resounds the tradition of stained-glass production, which flourished in post-war Lithuania, then often seen in public sculptures and state commissions. The artisans who remain in these glass workshops and whom Olšauskaitė continues to visit embody and transmit this artistry, which she, in turn, transforms and bends.

sekretas is punctuated by the appearance and vanishing of works by fellow artists, friends, and guests. Unannounced, their liminal presence will manifest itself throughout the exhibition.

sekretas is accompanied by an extensive public program that will unfold throughout the opening weekend. Moving between sonic contributions, a lecture performance, publications, and edible offerings, sekretas will be activated by Lauren Duffus, Antanas Lučiūnas / Ragemore, digestivo (Lucía Bayón and Lukas Meßner), Raimundas Malašauskas, BILL (Julie Peeters), and Han-Gyeol Lie.

sekretas will also be accompanied by secrets, a publication that gathers words, plants, and glass contributed by Elena Narbutaitė, Marija Olšauskaitė, Maria Tsoy, Aleksandra Krivulina, and Tom Engels, designed by Julie Peeters.

Marija Olšauskaitė (b. 1989, Lithuania) lives and works in Vilnius. Her solo exhibitions include Song Sing Soil (with Eglė Budvytytė), Vleeshal, Middelburg (2023); I Want to Stuff My Heart with Moss, Editorial, Vilnius (2022); Witness on our behalf, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2019); and Marija & Petras Olšauskai: Miss Bird, Art in General, New York City (2014), among others. Olšauskaitė participated in group exhibitions internationally, including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); and suddenly it all blossoms, RIBOCA2, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2020); Homegrown, Hauser & Wirth, online (2020); I walk the night, PM8/Francisco Salas, Vigo (2019); Joy and Mirror. Port city, Fourtoseven gallery, Riga (2016); and Karaoke Police, Kunstverein, Amsterdam (2015), Nomas, Rome (2014), Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2013), among others.

sekretas is realized with the support of the Embassy of Lithuania in Austria and the Honorary Consulate of Lithuania in Graz.

“It all started with a swinging bell,” she said. “I want the bell to crack.”

When a bell is struck, sign and time are given. For citizens to celebrate life in Old Town, for them to hide or worship, to lay off workers and to start again, to be reminded that life is finite, for the clearance sale to begin, for the photographer to rinse her exposed paper, a safelight blinking. Every time a bell is struck, it rings within. In this mutual implication of time and populace, RHYTHM, CITIZEN resounds.

RHYTHM, CITIZEN converges the brand names of two manufacturers of clocks and watches: Rhythm and Citizen. Found and coupled, they set the scene for an exhibition that unravels and complicates how the measures of time move and make move; how they give pulse to artifacts, their fictions and patina; how their fleetingness tantalizes the making of an image.

RHYTHM, CITIZEN punctuates the Grazer Kunstverein by way of sculpture, photography, design, and situated interventions. It marks the instance when time is halted, frozen and encrusted, and then again set into motion. It wandered from the city of Nicosia, like a passage or a crossing, like a captor of time—eyes unfurled, then, again, shut.

RHYTHM, CITIZEN takes shape through the cadence of a poem, the periodicity of labor, the sliding of glass doors, the frequencies of life, the patterns of music, and the movement marked by a succession of strong and weak elements. 

RHYTHM, CITIZEN gathers friends and collaborators, neighbors and facilitators: Felix Taylor (Platten Haus), Koula Savvidou, Tasos Lamnisos (x.ypno), Stelios Ilchuk, Claudia Paschalides, Kyriakos Kyriakides, Marietta Mavrokordatou, and Photo Net.

RHYTHM, CITIZEN is an occasion for EXHAUST [ΕΞΩΣΤ], an album by x.ypno & steliosilchuk to be played aloud and alive, and for Borrowed, a publication by Maria Toumazou, Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis, Georgia Triantafyllidou, Maya Tounta, Koula Savvidou, and Evagoras Vanezis, to be launched.

RHYTHM, CITIZEN is accompanied by R,C, a publication that combines artist statement, photography, and Cypriot rap, with contributions by Koula Savvidou, Tasos Lamnisos (x.ypno), Stelios Ilchuk, Maria Toumazou, Julie Peeters, and Tom Engels.

A bell is struck within her and keeps on ringing.
A bell is struck and keeps on ringing.

Maria Toumazou (b. 1989, Cyprus) is an artist and publisher based in Nicosia. Recent solo presentations include SCRAP B, Point Centre for Contemporary Art at Moufflon Bookshop, Nicosia (2022); Coil, Hot Wheels Athens (2021); and Fair-face Elysée, Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia (2019), among others. Toumazou has participated in group exhibitions including SISTERHOOD, Streaming voices unifying energies, Angelo Plessas and P.E.T. Projects, Nicosia (2021); Touch Release, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2021); Hypersurfacing, NiMAC, Nicosia (2019); Soft stone documents, Municipal Arts Centre, Limassol (2017), among others. Neoterismoi Toumazou (Toumazou’s former collective with Orestis Lazouras and Marina Xenofontos) was invited as a special guest to the Cyprus Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2017, Venice, curated by Jan Verwoert. Toumazou is the (co-)founder of Neoterismoi Toumazou, Maria Editions, and Metafora. She was a guest student at Städelschule, Frankfurt, after completing her studies at Goldsmiths College, London, and the Glasgow School of Art. RHYTHM, CITIZEN is her first institutional solo presentation.   

The exhibition is realized with the generous support of the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture – Cultural Services, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, and steirischer herbst ’22. Maria Toumazou’s residency at Grazer Kunstverein is made possible with the support of the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture – Cultural Services (through the TRANSIT 2022 Artist Residency Programs scheme). 

The exhibition would not be possible without the support of Hot Wheels Athens, Claudia Paschalides, Mariel Kouveli, and Orestis Lazouras.

Attentive to the ways object, gesture, and affect are mutually implicated, appendage quivers between the remnants of fractured existence and the unbridled desire and pleasure to hold things—together and anew. Harnessing both situated and dislocated supplies, appendage unfolds as a series of fixtures, both material and situational, that are in turn connected or plugged into the architectural and social infrastructure of the Grazer Kunstverein.

doorways, door frames, bar handles, manual mechanisms, outdoor connectors, door eyes, cabin hooks, hinges, stoppers, 3M double-sided adhesive, self-adhesive, window tint removal kit, PVC shock absorber & screws, holes, original column, modern copy of original column, partition walls, galvanized steel, plasterboard, white paint, Olympia black corded phone, wall text, wall mount system, wall absorbers, phone memory, ring tone, handsets, large buttons, cell dead zones, audio assist feature, remote access, cable, splitter, missed calls, call history, membership fee, membership benefits, dispatches, open letter, agreement template, computer floor, calcium sulphate, high strength polypropylene, vinyl, linoleum, laminate, rubber, panels lowered and reversed, removed carpet, base, head, pedestal assembly, stringer, previous institutional identity, stationery, bumpers, nipple shields, sugar substitute, stretch film, food processor, standard blade, drinking water fountains, fittings, rings, stainless steel pipes, elbow, reducer, tee type, cross type, coupling, unions, adaptors, olet, fixtures, flanges, valves, drains, rub handling, outlets, distribution boards, equipment support, Humanscale NeatLink cable management, defender mini, channel rubber, defender cable crossover defender compact, line wiring, today’s standard, wall jack, 30 meter telephone extension cable, 300 bathing suit sets, 300 shirts, motors, chilled water pump, water booster, transducer, cable, charger, network, alarm, security key box, password, extender pro, repeater pro, long range access point, Waveshare screens, black glass, cartons, organic eggs, safety lights, lights on loan, lights for an exhibition, 3 racks, 6 squares, fluorescent bulbs, electrodes, shunted sockets, screw-type base, thermal paper, adding machines, coating, zero ink system, heat, sun, friction, arm fetish, hand fetish, transport van, CB0209PH, books on events according to your date of birth, old astrology guides, prefaces, wires, metal fences and cages retired from circulation, brushed nickel 6-pack stainless steel, gold threads, interior doors, separators, hand rests, windbreakers, wine glasses, magnetic panties, happiness pills, unseizable property, turquoise shades, exterior emulsion, buckets, ice machine loan, oxygen concentrator, PVC belts, plastic wrap, two identical melamine boxes with locks, Christmas trees, the last 230 objects from a store (sold), various for birds, some big black leather couches, we women complete series, free admission,… aggregate and detach.

appendage emerges in the structural dissection of the institution as a public body. Currents of access, data, phone calls, water supply, temperature, electricity, architecture, geography, legal bond, membership, and support structures are scored anew as they are redistributed, diverted, or disrupted. In such an instance of structural glitch, appendage lifts institutional functions from their normative behaviors and replenishes them with transient affiliations and elective affinities.

appendage exposes how objects and their functions continue drifting inseparably from personal and collective attachments and gives body to the enmeshment between infrastructure and affective economies. It lays the transactional conditions that constitute the collective dimensions of intimacy bare and inflamed.

appendage will be accompanied by prefaces to appendage, a publication with contributions by Arnisa Zeqo, Iris Touliatou, Julie Peeters, Lisa Holzer, Tom Engels, and Quinn Latimer.

appendage will host a sound program with oral contributions by artists including Alison Knowles, Eduardo Costa, Eleni Poulou, Hannah Weiner, among others.

On June 24, in addition to the opening at Grazer Kunstverein, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark (18:00) and <rotor> (20:00) will open their exhibitions. The opening speech at Grazer Kunstverein takes place at 19:00. After the openings, there will be a DJ set and drinks at Kombüse. A shuttle bus from Vienna will be provided:
15:00: Departure Opernringhof, Vienna to Graz
22:30: Departure Burgring 2 to Vienna
Registration at: lw@halle-fuer-kunst.at

Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Athens) lives and works in Athens. Recent solo exhibitions include Organs, EXILE, Vienna (2020); and Overnight, Radio Athènes, Athens (2019). Touliatou has been part of the group exhibitions 2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York (2021–22); Work and Leisure, Milan (2022), When I state I am an anarchist, PLATO, Ostrava (2022); Anabasis, Rodeo Gallery, Athens (2022); Eclipse, the 7th Athens Biennale (2021); Lives of an Object, Andreas Melas and ARCH, Athens (2021); The Way In, Haus N Athen, Athens (2021); Anti Structure, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2021); Interval, Goethe-Institut Athen (2021); The Same River Twice, Benaki Museum, Athens (2019); and Manifesta 12, 5x5x5: Selected Projects, Palermo (2018), among others. In 2022 Touliatou will participate in SIREN (some poetics) at Amant Foundation, New York. appendage is her first institutional presentation in Austria.

“We are honed to tolerate boring work. The hundred letter words emerging like alphabet soup, like faces in a funhouse mirror, feeling more and more distorted in my body. Everything around, appearing quite tiny, as if seen through a keyhole. We sat rigid, except for the parts of our bodies that were needed for production. We sat in this way, pointed to reassemble people. Lights flickering across our eyes. And propped up in attitudes, counterfeiting life,” a female voice rhythmically recites in Sandra Lahire’s Terminals (1986).

we sat rigid except for the parts of our bodies that were needed for production is an exhibition that convenes the work of the late British experimental filmmaker Sandra Lahire and the Italian artist and designer Celeste Burlina. Coming from two distinct eras of feminist practice, their piercing meditations on the porosity of the body, labor, and environmental trouble enter into joint fabulation. 

we sat rigid… is host to six films by Lahire, of which five are newly digitized. Her galvanizing handling of the celluloid moving image addresses the ways in which capital and patriarchy mold and deplete vital faculties of the body, the earth, and ultimately the moving image itself. Her first two films, Arrows (1984) and Edge (1986), are firmly rooted in her persistent struggle with anorexia and the idealization of the female body. Together, they render a confronting account of the cultural causes of her drive towards thinness while she simultaneously seizes control over the production of her own image. Terminals (1986) broadens these autobiographical reflections and introduces another cycle of works—Plutonium Blonde (1987), Uranium Hex (1987), and Serpent River (1989)—, which probes into radiation, the mining of uranium, and the social and environmental destruction that comes with it. Against the backdrop of a looming nuclear war and the disintegration of miners’ communities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the 1980s, she examines this atomic reality in a fractured, sensitizing fashion. Approximately 35 years later, her concerns gain traction again and put the urgent need for the political recognition of corporeal vulnerability to the fore once more.

Celeste Burlina responds by way of an architectural intervention, carrier (2022), which echoes Lahire’s cinematic exploration of mining, industrial production, and female labor. Attentive to the ways infrastructure enables or obstructs the gathering of bodies and their circulation, Burlina’s proposition cuts through the three galleries of the Kunstverein. Starting off as a deceptive proposition reminiscent of minimalist sculpture, the work transforms and develops in function and meaning as it carries along. Oscillating between the functional and ornamental, carrier both serves as a support structure for Lahire’s moving image and interrogates the body of the Kunstverein as such. Burlina, who is trained as a structural engineer, rewires the function and purposefulness of raw, technical materials—H-beams, chains, rods, bits, and methyl methacrylate sheets—and thwarts her longstanding relationship with such supplies often associated with brute, subjugating forces. As Lahire’s films are brimming with these elements as well, Burlina performs a dialogical act and seeks to undo the rigidity these materials propose while insisting on their potential for powerful transformation.

What is called into being is a sensuous dialogue beyond the limitations of linear time—a resonant space sustained by two voices in fervent inclination.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Grazer Kunstverein will publish we sat rigid…, the first in a series of small volumes of correspondence, responses, and conversations. It includes contributions by Celeste Burlina, Tom Engels, Laura Guy, Calla Henkel, Charlotte Procter, Kerstin Schroedinger, and Miriam Stoney.

The exhibition is developed with the support of LUX, London.

Sandra Lahire (1950-2001, United Kingdom) was a feminist experimental filmmaker. Her artistic legacy includes ten 16 mm films in which she explores the body’s vulnerability. Lahire’s oeuvre investigates the representation of the (female) body and how it comes to bear traces of socio-political and ecological collapse. Lahire was a central member of London’s experimental filmmaking community in the 1980s and 1990s and was involved with the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and the London-based feminist film and video distributors Circles and Cinenova. Her essay “Lesbians in Media Education” was published in Visibly Female in 1987. In 1993, she composed a musical score for Just About Now by the British artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes. Lahire studied Philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Fine Art Film at St Martins School of Art, and Film & Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art in London. She passed away after an enduring struggle with anorexia.

Celeste Burlina (b. 1988, Italy; lives in Berlin) works as an artist, designer, and writer. Her exhibition designs and scenographies articulate the relationship between people and infrastructure and focus on the dramaturgy of attention and attending. She developed made-to-measure installations and spatial interventions for “trust & confusion” at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021), “30 Years of KW: Anniversary Weekend” (2021) at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021), Creamcake’s 3hd Festival “Power Play” at Park Center Treptow, Berlin (2021), and “im garten der blicke” at Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimünster, Aachen (2020). Previously, Burlina worked for the design and architecture studio Sub, with whom she completed projects for exhibitions by Anne Imhof at Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Tate Modern (London), and Palais de Tokyo (Paris), as well as for Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin) and Balenciaga. Burlina is a Doctor of Engineering.