^{photos © by Daniel Hill}

January 12th – February 11, 2024
Opening: January 11th, 6 p.m.
Exhibition opening times: THU – SAT, 2 – 6 pm

With works by Katharina Birkmann, Maja Bojanić, nathan c’ha, Mark Chehodaiev, Alessandra Ferrini, Onyeka Igwe, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Ivana Lazić, Arina Nekliudova, Carmiña Tarilonte Rodríguez, Elske Rosenfeld & Olia Sosnovskaya, SKGAL (Nina Höchtl, Julia Wieger), Tsai-Ju Wu, Lorenz Zenleser

Curated by Georgia Holz, and Stephanie Misa

“Silences have frequencies. I want us to ask, ‘How can we learn to hear silences that echo loudly, softly, or in code?’”
– Panashe Chugumadzi, “Hearing the Silence”

The exhibition Archival Sites of Speculation: Storying the Silence seeks to contribute to critical discussions on the archive as a space of artistic research and the experimental methods used in exploring convergent and divergent histories. It creates an experimental space within which methodologies of proximity and engagement with archives can be divulged. The participating artists seek to negotiate the constitutive
limits of the archive. The artworks envisage what is missing from documentation, testimony or kept historical material. With these methods, historical and archival research is combined with a critical fabulation to make productive sense of absence within an archive.

Participants of the seminar Working the Archive especially contribute specific positionalities to the exhibition in relation to working with the VBKÖ and other archives. Hinting at exclusions and omissions inherent in archives Arina Nekliudova, Ivana Lazić and Katharina Birkmann work with documents from the VBKÖ archive, namely membership registers and a 1932 Exchange Exhibition Catalog. Their works refer to internal tensions and an abstraction of relationships within the Association, much of which is left for us to imagine, also giving a nod to the VBKÖ secession of the Wiener Frauenkunst. On the other hand, the imprinting of documents from the VBKÖ archive into another medium enables
Lorenz Zenleser to mobilize multiple temporalities of documentation.

This exhibition is a culmination of a year-long research project Anonymity and Absence – Archival Sites of Speculation, supported by the Program for Inter- and Transdisciplinary Projects in Art and Research (INTRA), at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The project seeks to contribute to critical discussions on the archive as a space of artistic research, crucially asking how one performs the missing parts of an archive, and how can we weave alternative and unwritten histories into what is present within a collection.

Die Ausstellung Archival Sites of Speculation: Storying the Silence versteht sich als kritischer Beitrag zur Diskussion über das Archiv als Ort künstlerischer Forschung und über experimentelle Methoden zur Befragung konvergente und divergente Geschichte(n). Die Ausstellung möchte einen experimentellen Raum öffnen, in dem Methoden der Annäherung an und Auseinandersetzung mit Archiven erprobt und offengelegt werden können. So sollen die konstitutiven Grenzen des Archivs verschoben werden. Die Arbeiten der beteiligten Künstler:innen machen sichtbar, was in der Dokumentation fehlt, und verweisen auf die Lücken in der Überlieferung von Erinnerung, Zeugnissen oder historischem Material. Die verwendeten Methoden führen historische und archivarische Recherchen mit „kritischem Fabulieren“ zusammen, um die Lücken und das Schweigen innerhalb der Archive produktiv zu machen. Die Teilnehmer:innen der Lehrveranstaltung Working the Archive
haben neue Arbeiten entwickelt, die das Archiv der Vereinigung
bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (VBKÖ) zum Ausgangspunkt genommen haben. Sie nehmen eine spezifische Position im Rahmen der Ausstellung ein.