Preview – FOTOGALERIE WIEN

On Monday, September 15, we reopen with a Pop-Up Week!

For the first time the FOTOGALERIE WIEN will be hosting a pop-up week with various actions, talks, screenings and presentations will be made. This will give a foretaste of NARRATIVE, our focal point for 2025/2026. The first exhibition in the series, Topografie der Erinnerung will be showing works by artists who are engaged with, on the one hand, (subjective) memories and their visual embodiment and, on the other, with the pictorial histories that emerge from archive materials.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 5:00–9:00 PM
Finissage: JOJO GRONOSTAY, Logo Lamp 06, in the DISPLAY CABINET:
5:00–9:00 PM
Presentation of the publication Eating the Other: 6:00 PM

The publication accompanying Jojo Gronostay’s exhibition Logo Lamp 06 in the DISPLAY CABINET collects together photographic material from online stores, articles and research sources that are concerned with questions such as how visual codes change, how politics impacts fashion and the relationship between aesthetic surfaces and ideological depths. The title of the publication is taken from the text by bell hooks, Eating the Other.

Über den einfachen Hausrat
Talk: EVA ENGELBERT with STEFANIE KITZBERGER (in German):
7:00 PM

The basis for this talk is Eva Engelbert‘s book Einfacher Hausrat (2023). This takes the eponymous competition of 1916 at the Vienna Imperial School of Applied Arts as the point of departure for the artist’s involvement with social, political and design issues. The discussion with Stefanie Kitzberger will focus on historical exclusions as well as their relevance to current role ascriptions. Forgotten practices and everyday formalities will be re-evaluated as resistant, creative vehicles. How language, material, models and space are dealt with opens up various forms of archiving and remembering.

Eva Engelbert is an artist and teacher. Her sculptures deconstruct and reconstruct historical narratives through abstraction, interweaving and imitation in a way that renegotiates formal principles and relationships to materials and space on the basis of a feminist perspective.

Stefanie Kitzberger is an author, curator and deputy head of the Kunstsammlung und Archiv Institute of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where she is presently completing her dissertation in art history.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 7:00 PM
Film Screening: JOERG BURGER, Archiv der Zukunft, followed by a discussion between the artist and ROBERT ILLEK, chief taxidermist at the Natural History Museum Vienna (in German).

Joerg Burger, Archiv der Zukunft, Austria 2023, 92 min., German with English subtitles, direction, cinematography and concept: Joerg Burger

With painstaking energy, the Natural History Museum Vienna collects, researches, archives and reflects on more than thirty million objects. Brought together over centuries, these are regularly re-examined. Archiv der Zukunft offers a glimpse behind the scenes of a museum which is steeped in tradition and which – away from the well-known displays in glass-cases – reveals a microcosm of institutional research intent on meeting current social challenges. A filmic homage to the significance of science and an insightful consideration of life on earth – and elsewhere.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 5:00–9:00 PM
Opening: HANS SCHABUS, Was nicht da ist, in the DISPLAY CABINET:
5:00–9:00 PM
Exhibition duration: September 21, 2025 – February 14, 2026

In this exhibition, you can see parts of a sign with the word “Maintenant.” That is French and means “Now.” The sign was part of an art project last year — for an exhibition in France. The project was about activism (that means protest) and art. Both activism and art want to make something visible. When something is important, we need to show it — best of all, now. The sign with the word “Maintenant” reminds us: Do something — and do it now! On the way to France, a photo was taken. The artist was carrying the sign. The photo captures a moment — just a brief second between before and after. For the exhibition, the sign was cut into pieces. That way, it fits into the display case. It shows: Time — and even a word — can break into parts. In the end, one question remains: What is not there?

This text was created according to the rules of plain language, with the help of AI.

Documenting the Everyday: Vernacular Photography as Historical Narrative
Talk with MASHA WYSOCKA and RÓZA TEKLA SZILÁGYI (in English):
7:00 PM

This dialogue is intended to generate discussion about everyday photography, photo archives and research into them. The Belgian-Spanish multidisciplinary artist Masha Wysocka, is concerned with research based projects about historical, scientific and political subject matter. She is presenting her project, Truth is Stranger than Fiction, in the form of an artist’s book. The project aims at creating a discourse between the archive collections of the “Blinken Open Society Archives” (Budapest) which was established under communism. Róza Tekla Szilágyi is co-founder and director of the „Eidolon Centre“ in Budapest which is dedicated to presenting, researching, analysing and publishing photographs of everyday life, image-generating everyday products and projects which work with this kind of pictorial material. In addition she is co-initiator of the Hungarian photo collection, Horus-Archive and Fortepan.