Solid Roof, Severe Weather
Exhibition, 4.11. – 18.12.2021
Kunsthalle Exnergasse | WUK

With works by Tekla Aslanishvili, Peles Empire, Manu Luksch, Marlene Maier, Shawn Maximo, Olena Newkryta, Michael Simku
Curated by Marlene Maier, Olena Newkryta
Documentation by Olena Newkryta, Wolfgang Thaler

The standardized floor plans of ex-Soviet prefab buildings conjure the ghosts of socialist ideologies. An antique Georgian empire is revived as a visualization for a luxury holiday resort, only to end up as a failed Smart City project. And while a society – escaping from environmental catastrophes and inequality – concedes the ultimate retreat to an underground cavern, wild animals conquer the algorithmically flood-lit cityscape of a metropolis.

The audiovisual works presented in the exhibition Solid Roof, Severe Weather trace the social and economic fault lines in our contemporary society to speculate about the future of cities and the lives of the people who inhabit them. The artists employ diverse essayistic and speculative methods to devise tangible narratives for urban planning strategies, capital flows, and algorithms as agents with an impact on our everyday lives. In this context, the first part of the title, Solid Roof, refers to the infrastructures essential to our day-to-day routines; Severe Weather, on the other hand, draws from the socio-political and ecological challenges that destabilize these very foundations.

Find a longer essay on the exhibition by Simon Nagy in the online magazin Disclaim & a review by Anna Barbieri for the Vienna Art Week.