Current artistic positions enter into a dialogue with selected works from the mumok collection and objects from the collections of the Natural History Museum Vienna to foreground the hybrid as an effective tenet, not only in artistic but also societal and political realms.
The exhibition celebrates the historical-cultural processes of creolization as a mode of world-making that has always been there. It features works that open perspectives to postcolonial histories of diversity, to satirical transliteration, queer folklore, and collective feminist rituals, to the molecular borders of the human body and its entanglements with science and technology.
In the case of Peruvian-raised Nicolás Lamas, it is less about the divides between the sexes, but rather the interfaces and fractures between art, science, technology, and everyday culture. The artist works with a repository of partly found, partly self-made objects and images, which he combines into ever new arrangements. In the exhibition, his works converge with objects from the Natural History Museum Vienna, rendering the ossified categories of art and science porous.
When Mexican-born artist Mariana Castillo Deball investigates diverse subjects such as the pre-Hispanic history of her country, mathematical models, or fables, myths, and other forms of literature, it is always objects that come to her attention. She questions these “non-humans,” as she refers to her items of choice, about what they have to say about the world—a world we humans construct around them, one we manipulate, define, and whose objects we use in different ways.
The work of the Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars addresses and performs multilingualism. In their artistic practice dedicated to the social and cultural contexts of the terrain “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China,” they deconstruct the notion of culture as something bound to a nation-state, religion, or language. Syncretism becomes a principle here. In the exhibition, Slavs and Tatars bring together their own language-based works with those from the collection that deal with body parts as an affective, sensual aspect of language.
Artists Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová, who grew up in Romania and Slovakia, are responsible for the exhibition architecture of mixed up with others before we even begin. Designed for the previous exhibition Collaborations, the ruins of this display serve as both the conceptual and spatial framework for the current show. In addition, the duo presents a site-specific intervention that unfurls like a mycelium in the exhibition spaces.
The exhibition is accompanied by a symposium in cooperation with IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies | University of Art and Design Linz in Vienna. Under the title The Virtues of Vulnerability. Societies in Times of Trouble the symposium examines concrete sites and problem zones where the vulnerable fabric of life becomes political and/or promising strategies of dealing with the bruises of extractivist projects rise to the surface. It will introduce and discuss lines of thought and diverse practices that can turn apparent deficiencies into assets.
mixed up with others before we even begin
Symposium curated by Karin Harrasser and Franz Thalmair
Exhibition curated by Franz Thalmair
Participating artists: Leilah Babirye, Mariana Castillo Deball, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Nilbar Güreş, Nicolás Lamas, Slavs and Tatars – with works from the mumok collection and objects from the collections of the Natural History Museum Vienna
mumok Vienna
November 26, 2022 to April 10, 2023
