For 2025/26, the curatorial team of FOTOGALERIE WIEN has chosen to focus on NARRATIVES, exploring narrative strategies and structures in contemporary photography and video art. The three exhibitions developed for this theme are organised chronologically: The first part, Topographies of Memory, looks back at the past through an examination of archival material, historiography, and collective and individual memory. The second part, Present Forms, addresses the question of how digital media can inform new narrative modes, and considers the overwhelming number of constantly available narratives in a networked world. The third part looks to the future and is dominated by visionary, fictional and speculative narrative modes, which are based on a desire to perceive the world differently or to escape it.
Linear and unambiguous narrative structures are replaced in the artistic works of the three exhibitions by discontinuous, fragmentary and circular representations, or those that lie between documentation and construction. Expectations are broken, and entrenched narratives are disrupted or dissolved in favour of multi-perspective narratives. There is also a focus on storytelling itself: what is told, by whom, and how, and how meanings, language and communication change.
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2. December 2025 — 17. January 2026
For 2025/26, the curatorial team of FOTOGALERIE WIEN has chosen to focus on NARRATIVES, exploring narrative strategies and structures in contemporary photography and video art. The three exhibitions developed for this theme are organised chronologically: The first part, Topographies of Memory, looks back at the past through an examination of archival material, historiography, and collective and individual memory.[...] -
17. March 2026 — 25. April 2026
Our society has long since entered a post-narrative world. In place of the grand, identity-forming narratives of modernity, we are exposed to a ceaseless “tsunami of information” (Byung-Chul Han). The manic accumulation of data and the incessant noise of communication have taken the place of narrative as a constitutive force of community. NARRATIVE II: Present Forms brings together artistic works that take up these phenomena of our digital reality, critically examine them, but also turn them on their head. As counter-models to our mediatized everyday world, they possess an inherent poetic power capable of producing new narrative forms. [...]