Secession Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Katrin Hornek, Karin Pauer, Sabina Holzer, Zosia Hołubowska, and Jeanette Pacher in conversation

testing grounds is an immersive live installation conceived by Katrin Hornek and developed in a collaborative process involving artists as well as researchers and scientists from different fields. It addresses the measurable evidence and effects of radioactive fallout dispersed around the world as a result of heavy testing of nuclear weapons, especially during the Cold War era.

Listen to the artist Katrin Hornek, choreographer Karin Pauer, writer and dancer Sabina Holzer, sound artist Zosia Hołubowska, and the curator Jeanette Pacher talk about the project and its coming about from their respective perspectives, but also what it means to work collaboratively so closely. The conversation was recorded on May 13, 2024 in the context of the exhibition.

Katrin Hornek

testing grounds

In collaboration with Karin Pauer, Sabina Holzer, and Zosia Hołubowska

8.3. – 2.6.2024

With her artistic oeuvre and curatorial practice, Katrin Hornek playfully engages with the strange paradoxes of living in the age of the Anthropocene, that is, the new geologic epoch where the effects of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism are written into the body of the earth. She asserts a more complex understanding of the entwinement of so-called nature and culture that recognizes that our bodies and cultures are substantially and spiritually connected with other creatures and the elements that make up our world. As an artistic strategy, Hornek follows the stories and traces of the material world into their countless networks to create narratives. More

Katrin Hornek (*1983, Austria) studied performative art and sculpture in Vienna and Copenhagen. She is a member of the Anthropocene Commons network and teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Department of Site-Specific Art). Recent exhibitions at Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano (2022), Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (2021), Riga Biennale (2020), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019). Awarded the Msgr. Otto Mauer Prize (2021). www.katrinhornek.net

Karin Pauer (*1983, Austria) is a performer and choreographer. The exploration of relations, in-betweens, empathy, and togetherness informs all her works. She negotiates these notions combining embodied choreographic practices with language, visual arts, and live music. Her works have been shown in various Viennese institutions as well as at local and international festivals. www.karinpauer.com

Sabina Holzer (*1966, Austria) works as a dancer, choreographer and author in the field of extended choreography. She is concerned with practices of community, ecology, philosophy, materiality, science fiction and poetry. Her collaborative performances, interventions and texts are shown and published locally and internationally. www.cattravelsnotalone.at

Zosia Hołubowska (1988, Poland) is a sound artist, queer music activist, researcher, and producer. With performances, sound installations, radio works and soundscapes, they work on topics of queering archives, healing practices, and interspecies intimacy.

Performance: Martina De Dominicis, Cat Jimenez, Mani Obeya, Karin Pauer

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Katrin Hornek

Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession

Produced by Jeanette Pacher

Rosa Hausleithner erzählt im Gespräch mit Sophie Thun von ihren Anfängen als Künstlerin, ihrer Zeit an der Akademie in der Bildhauerklasse von Bruno Gironcoli und wie sich ihre Arbeiten von ortspezifischen, skulptural-architektonischen Interventionen zu gemalten Raumkompositionen entwickelt haben. Diese Folge wurde am 7. Juni 2024 im Podcast-Studio der Secession aufgenommen.

Rosa Hausleithners polychrome Bildräume formieren sich primär in ihren Gedanken. Als kleine, skizzenhafte Linienzeichnungen werden sie mit Blei- und Farbstiften auf Papier fixiert, um dann in Acryl auf Leinwand ausformuliert zu werden. Von der Bildhauerei kommend, baut die 1952 in Wien geborene Künstlerin mit ihren Gemälden fiktionale Farbräume, die sich den perspektivischen Regeln gezielt widersetzen. „Die Farbgebung, einmal opak, oftmals luzid, verstärkt und / oder verführt den Blick des Betrachtens, bis hin zur Imagination eines Kippeffekts. Dadurch entstehen im Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Bildbausteine immer wieder neu definierte Standpunkte.“ (Rosa Hausleithner über ihre Arbeit anlässlich der Verleihung des 2020 von der Secession vergebenen Gmoser Preises).

Rosa Hausleithner absolvierte 1984 ihr Bildhauereistudium bei Bruno Gironcoli an der Akademie der bildenden Künste in Wien und stellte u. a. in der Neuen Galerie Graz, im Künstlerhaus Salzburg, in der Secession, der Kunsthalle Krems und im Museum auf Abruf in Wien aus. Sie war im Vorstand der IG Bildende Kunst tätig und Beiratsmitglied des Kulturrat Österreich. Seit ist sie 1987 Mitglied der Secession.

Sophie Thun (*1985, lebt und arbeitet in Wien) arbeitet vor allem mit Techniken der analogen Fotografie, ihren Räumen, Prozessen sowie Produktions- und Ausstellungsbedingungen. Aufgewachsen in Warschau, absolvierte Thun ihr Masterstudium an den Akademien der bildenden Künste in Wien und in Krakau. Thun ist seit 2021 im Vorstand der Secession, wo sie 2020 eine Einzelausstellung hatte; von 2023 bis 2025 ist sie Interims-Professorin der Klasse für Fotografie an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Secession Podcast: Artists ist eine Gesprächsreihe mit Mitgliedern der Secession.

Das Dorotheum ist exklusiver Sponsor des Secession Podcasts.

Jingle: Hui Ye mit einem Ausschnitt aus Combat of dreams für Streichquartett und Zuspielung (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) von Alexander J. Eberhard.

Schnitt: Paul Macheck

Produktion: Bettina Spörr, Jeanette Pacher

Programmiert vom Vorstand der Secession

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist Imran Perretta and the curator Bettina Spörr. It was recorded on March 8, 2024 in the context of the exhibition:

Imran Perretta tears of the fatherland 8.3. – 9.6.2024

Imran Perretta’s transdisciplinary practice spans moving image, sound, composition, performance art, and poetry. His works examine questions around power, state surveillance, alterity, neo-coloniality, and the process of identity formation in young people of Muslim heritage in Western countries in the post-9/11 era. His approach to these concerns is informed by his own experience: as a British citizen with Muslim roots, he is familiar with the challenges his works grapple with. More

Bettina Spörr is a curator at the Secession since 2008. Previously she was assistant curator and exhibition coordinator at the Generali Foundation Vienna.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Joshua Simon, Christian Lübbert & Francesco Finizio Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the curator Joshua Simon, the curator Christian Lübbert (Secession) and the artist Francesco Finizio. It was recorded on February 18, 2024 in the context of the exhibition:

SLIME Curated by Joshua Simon 16.2. – 30.6.2024

SLIME is a unique hybrid on-line and on-site project about our hybrid realities. Taking place at the Secession as an on-site event and as an on-line program, it includes commissioned and historic artworks, talks and performances, screenings and workshops (including one for making actual slime). Taking its name from the children’s toy—a metastable plasma-like substance that has both unique material and tactile features and a constant presence online through tutorials and documentation of people playing with it—SLIME tackles the social, cultural, political, and sensory operations of digital hybridity. More

Joshua Simon, born in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel in 1979, lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Lüneburg, Germany.

Christian Lübbert holds the position of the Junior Curator at the Secession. He has worked with art institutions such as Tate Modern, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, Chisenhale Studios, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Delfina Foundation in London, as well as Studio Simon Denny, Galerie House of Egorn, and the Brandenburg Art Prize. Since 2017, he runs Arnis Residency, an annual residency for international artists.

Francesco Finizio was born in the United States to Italian immigrants. He studied at School of Visual Arts and the Hunter College MFA program and left the US shortly thereafter for France where he is based today. He has worked several times with Joshua Simon since 2010.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Joshua Simon, Christian Lübbert & Francesco Finizio Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Members is a series of conversations featuring members of the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the member Dorit Margreiter Choy and the corresponding member Sabine Breitwieser. It was recorded on December 13, 2023.

Dorit Margreiter Choy lives and works in Vienna. She studied fine arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Extended study visits and scholarships have brought her to Tokyo, Berlin and Los Angeles, among other places. Her work has been shown in numerous international and national museums, exhibitions, and biennials, including extensive solo exhibitions at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (2019), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2011), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2009), the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig (2006), the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck (2001), and, most recently, the Plečnik Museum in Ljubljana (2023), as well as in exhibitions at the EUCA Annex in London (2023), the MACBA in Barcelona (2009), the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2012), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2012). She represented Austria at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia (2009), the Cairo Biennale (2008), and the Liverpool Biennale (2004). She has been professor of fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2006. She also taught at Cal Arts in Valencia near Los Angeles (2005–2006), the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena (2005), and elsewhere.

Sabine Breitwieser is an internationally active independent curator, scholar, and museum professional with decades of professional experience. She is currently based in Vienna. She was a 2020–2021 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles with a research project that she was able to pursue further in 2022. From 2013 until 2018, she held the position of artistic director and CEO at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Previously, from 2010 until 2013, she served as chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1988 until 2007, she was the founding director and chief curator of the Generali Foundation in Vienna, where she also oversaw the construction of the foundation’s home. She has organized and directed more than 150 monographic and thematic exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States and has also edited and published about 100 catalogues and books as well as numerous essays. In 2012, Sabine Breitwieser received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts in New York.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Dorit Margreiter Choy & Sabine Breitwieser Editor: Christian Lübbert

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Members is a series of conversations featuring members of the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the member Marianne in conversation with the members Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler. It was recorded on December 11, 2023.

Marianne Maderna (b. 1944) lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria. Her interdisciplinary installations, environments, and performances grapple with socially relevant concerns that address the human condition and devise novel ways to frame patterns of human behavior and hierarchical systems. Her work has been featured in exhibitions including RADICAL BUSTS, Arkadenhof, University of Vienna (2015); HUMANIMALS, Zeitkunst NÖ, Dominikanerkirche Krems (2013); Das erste Haus, Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna (1996); Raum und Ausgang, Secession, Vienna (1990–91); and Maderna, Secession, Vienna (1982). She was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to the State of Lower Austria in 2018; the Prize of the City of Vienna for Sculpture in 1996; and the Honorary Award for Visual Arts of the State of Lower Austria in 1991.

Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler live in Eichgraben near Vienna. They have been partners in life and art since 1990; the idea of “multiple authorship” plays a central role in their work. In the 1990s, they primarily worked with socially marginalized groups: prisoners, people with mental illnesses, and individuals with additional needs. Their creative practice subsequently shifted toward collaborations with children and school and university students. In addition to these group works, they have made art engaging with its historical, social, and political context and produced participatory projects that underscore the visitors’ or users’ active involvement in creative processes. Large-format drawings have flanked their work throughout the years. Christine has been professor of drawing and visual languages at the Institute of Art and Design in TU Wien’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning since 2002. Irene has led the class in cooperative strategies at the University of Fine Arts Münster since 2011.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Marianne Maderna, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler

Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the Agency of Singular Investigations (Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa) and the curator Annette Südbeck. It was recorded on December 15, 2023 in the context of the exhibition:

Agency of Singular Investigations On New Thinking And Other Forgotten Dreams 1.12.2023 – 25.2.2024

Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa founded Agency of Singular Investigations (ASI) in 2014 to take a stand on the dramatic changes in Russia’s political reality and cultural atmosphere and to respond to the advent of the postfactual age by thinking about alternative ways of harnessing images and means of communication for the construction of identities and worldviews.

At the Secession, ASI present the new installation On New Thinking and Other Forgotten Dreams. It is the first part of their wide-ranging research project The Park of Mind Revolutions, which investigates the history of subjectivity and the forms and functions of Russia’s self-image in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Organized as a dialogue between the worker Grigoriy Zamzin and a pickle about the meaning of Russia’s most recent history, the installation comprises four sculptures, a sprawling wall diagram, and a blue carpet. Taking inspiration from the interwar literature of magical realism, the artists employ carefully selected fantastic elements, irrational events, and metaphors to frame a critical perspective on the complexity of their country’s historical evolution. Playing with hybrid dimensions of reality and collisions between historical forces, they expose the energies that shape the psychological, technological, and social system. More

Dr. Annette Südbeck is managing director and curator at the Secession. She studied Fine Arts, German Studies and Arts in Braunschweig.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Annette Südbeck and ASI Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist Charlie Prodger and the curator Jeanette Pacher. It was recorded on December 1, 2023 in the context of the exhibition:

Charlie Prodger The Offering Formula 1.12.2023 – 25.2.2024

Charlie Prodger (b.1974) is a Scottish artist working with moving image, photography, sculpture and drawing. She won the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She is currently a 2023–24 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Broadly, Prodger’s work orbits histories - from the weight of deep geological time to more contingent forms of narrative such as anecdote and oral history. Through the prism of queer subjectivity, her work explores intertwined relations between the body, landscape, language, technology and time. More

Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Secession and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna / Site-Specific Art department. She was part of the editorial team of Ö1 Kunstradio and began working in the curatorial field at Kunsthalle Wien.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Jeanette Pacher Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist collective and association Mai Ling and the curator Christian Lübbert. It was recorded on November 3, 2023 in the context of the exhibition:

Mai Ling NOT YOUR ORNAMENT 15.9. – 12.11.2023

Founded in Vienna in 2019, Mai Ling is an artists’ collective and association dedicated to facilitating dialogues on experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and any kind of prejudgment, particularly against Asian FLINT* (women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, and trans). Rooted in solidarity against patriarchal and racial discrimination, the group offers a space and growing network to give voice to the many individuals affected by such discrimination and foster new forms of collaboration. As an anonymous collective and a multi-hybrid figure, with everyone identifying as “Mai Ling,” the group employs a variety of artistic and discursive formats such as performances, texts, videos, sound, installations, talk series, interventions, and protests. More

Christian Lübbert is a curator at the Secession. He has worked with art institutions such as Tate Modern, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, Chisenhale Studios, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Delfina Foundation in London, as well as Studio Simon Denny, Galerie House of Egorn and the Brandenburg Art Prize in Berlin. Since 2017, he runs Arnis Residency, an annual residency for international artists. In 2020, he organised Afloat Assembly, a residency for contemporary art on a sailing boat.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Christian Lübbert & Mai Ling Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert

Secession Podcast: Members is a series of conversations featuring members of the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the members Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber in conversation with Elke Krasny. It was recorded on October 18, 2023.

Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber live in Vienna and Vancouver. They have worked, primarily in the medium of photography, on the politics of how cities, architectures, and urban territories are negotiated through images since 1994. Recent works on Educational Modernism include the research project “Performing Spaces of Radical Pedagogies” (SFU, Vancouver, 2020), contributions to the exhibitions “Education Shock” (HKW Berlin, 2021), and their current exhibition “Darkroom of Educational Modernism” (station urbaner kulturen, nGbK Hellersdorf, Berlin, 2023/2024).

Elke Krasny, PhD, is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny’s research focuses on concerns and matters of care. Combining feminist care ethics and social reproduction theory, Krasny researches emancipatory practices concerned with counteracting social and environmental in/justices in architecture, art, urbanism, memory work, and curatorial practices in museums and urban spaces. In 2023, her book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care was published. (transcript).

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber & Elke Krasny Editor: Christian Lübbert

Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert