Nilbar Güreş, Headstanding Totem, 2014, c-print

The Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Enlightenment, the Axis of the World: Following these narrative strands, the exhibition GROW is centered around the tree as a subject in art and its relationship to humankind. Trees accompany our lives – as sources of oxygen, shade-givers, anchors of calm. Culturally, the tree has always been symbolic – a mysterious bearer of knowledge, signifier of strength and power, or harbinger of ecological aberrations to come.

Director Stella Rollig: “In the current climate crisis, the tree is perceived more than ever as a companion whose survival or demise has direct, tangible effects, not the least of which are emotional ones. While a tree dying on your own street is painful, the far-off deforestation of the rainforest is downright frightening. This exhibition explores this deep connection between humans and trees.”

Throughout the centuries, the tree has been an area of projection for humankind’s relationship to [...]

Hugo Canoilas, Eons of Time #2, 2020, glass

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the Earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens — the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species, Modern Man — was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no [...]

Werner Feiersinger, Middle School in Weiz, 2022, Courtesy Werner Feiersinger

The exhibition Viktor Hufnagl – Geometric Theorems is the first installment of Invited to invite, a program in which Franz Josefs Kai 3, Contemporary Art Space cooperates with institutions from neighboring fields. It was put together by the ÖGFA – Österreichische Gesellschaft für Architektur [Austrian Society for Architecture] to mark the one hundredth anniversary of its founding member’s birth.

Architect Viktor Hufnagl (1922 – 2007) was a pioneer of contemporary school design and an innovator of housing types who viewed his profession as a socio-political enterprise. Demonstrating a clear disposition toward geometric ordering systems, he produced robust buildings and habitats. Beginning in the mid1950s, Hufnagl gained experience in school design in the alpine provinces of Salzburg and Upper Austria. During the 1960s and 1970s, this culminated in his renditions of the Hallenschule, a school type in which classrooms are arranged around a [...]

Nilbar Güreş, Torn, 2018, installation, photograph, fabric, metal, nylon strings, clothes-pegs, Single channel video, Photo: Anna Konrath

Yes, we want all people to have the same rights and opportunities! Yes, we want to use art to raise awareness and to enable sustainable and effective encounters! Yes, we want to contribute to equality and to encourage and empower people who are marginalized or affected by discrimination. And yes, the world would be a better place if we were all feminists: “We should all be feminists!” (C. N. Adichie). The exhibition Empowerment brings together diverse feminist approaches and understands these as progressive methods to analyze the societies of the world with the means of art and to show possible ways out of the global crises.

Despite worldwide movements, demonstrations, and petitions to establish equality, it is still not possible in the twenty-first century to speak of comprehensive gender equality with regard to women and LGBTQIA+ communities—neither in this country nor elsewhere. In many places, structural relationships of [...]

Galerie Martin Janda is pleased to invite you to take part in a guided tour of the exhibition with curator Asier Mendizabal.

Friday 09.09.2022, 5pm

curated by 2022