Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

Galerie Martin Janda is part of curated by 2024 — Untold Narratives, the gallery festival with international curators in Vienna. The exhibition FRICTIONS, with works by Nilbar Güreş, Devin T. Mays, Martha Rosler, Roman Signer and Fredrik Værslev, is curated by Dieter Roelstraete and runs from September 13 until October 19, 2024.

At the center of FRICTIONS, the viewer encounters one of the most readily recognizable, ubiquitous objects known to humankind, on a par with the traffic cone or (these aren’t random examples) monobloc garden chair: a wooden shipping pallet — or rather, an awful lot of them.

Dieter Roelstraete (*1972) is the Curator for the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches. Recent projects at the Neubauer Collegium have featured the work of Gelitin, Rick Lowe, Pope.L, Martha Rosler, Cecilia Vicuna, and Christopher Williams. He previously worked as a curator for documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017. Prior to that, he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2012-2015), where he organized and co-organized The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2015); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016), among other exhibitions. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete was a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in his native Belgium. In recent years, he has curated exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada in Milan and Venice, Garage (Moscow) and S.M.A.K. (Ghent); in 2022, Roelstraete drafted the curatorial impulse for that year’s curated_by gallery festival in Vienna. He has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals.