Yuki Okumura | Aglaia Konrad | Ana Vaz

Yuki Okumura
In his site-specific exhibition, Yuki Okumura explores the past and present of the Secession’s Hauptraum (“main space”). With reference to conceptual art, experimental music, and postmodern dance, Okumura designed a playful procedure and asked people related to the Hauptraum to enact it. Updating institutional critique in human terms, Okumura’s projects explore how the conditions and contexts of the Hauptraum have been, can be, and will be shaped through personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal forces. Or, is it perhaps the space itself that uses us to reveal and renew its personality and biography?

Yuki Okumura was born in 1978 in Aomori. He lives and works mainly in the Central European time zone.

Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Curated by Bettina Spörr.

Aglaia Konrad: Autofictions in Stone
Stone is omnipresent in all our lives; not least saliently, in the form of the architectures in which we live and work. In films, photographs, and sculptures, Aglaia Konrad grapples with their utopias and contradictions. The exhibition Autofictions in Stone that makes the dovetailing of architecture, image, and body tangible, is informed by the artist’s experimentation with relations of scale and perceptions of spaces. Konrad is particularly fascinated by quarries and the demolition of architecture, which, as she argues, always hold a sculptural potential. Her projects underline the aesthetic appeal of stones as formable material, which we humans dress for our purposes on a daily basis and which yet transcend our lives by millions of years.

Aglaia Konrad was born 1960 in Salzburg. She lives and works in Brussels.

Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Curated by Jeanette Pacher.

Ana Vaz: Meteoro
In her film-poems artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz collages images and sounds that revolve around violence and repression, the impact of ecological ruin and the continued colonization of the earth. The deconstruction of the grand narrative of Western modernity that imposes itself across vast territories on this planet lies at the heart of her filmography. In her exhibition at the Secession, Vaz showcases her new film series Meteoro (2023–). Predominantly focusing on Paris and Porto, European cities are depicted as on the verge of collapse or on the path to extinction. Meteoro does not provide us with a singular narrator, but rather a choir of voices. The inverted and fused images reveal not a hegemonial gaze, nor a rational perspective with scientific objectivity, but rather disorienting fragments and details, opening a space for multiple trajectories and the possibility of movement elsewhere.

Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Curated by Damian Lentini.