Cooking the city – artists as contingency architects

“Contingency is, quite simply, the fact that things could be otherwise than they are” William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation

Thinking of the city as a space produced by the interaction of historically and geographically specific institutions, social relations of reproduction, practices of government, forms and media of communication and so forth (James Donald), five artistic positions, engaging tangentially with such topics in their work are being presented. Vienna becomes in this scenario merely the ‘kitchen’ where the participating artists currently live (or have lived). Its specificity is not researched directly, but the city is looked at as a representation, an “imagined environment” (James Donald), of course without denying the factors contributing to Vienna’s status as a global city (Saskia Sassen’s concept). The works presented are interswitching perspectives and open up various pathways of reading the triangle city, space and its inhabitants (the social body), altering poetical, metaphorical views with frontal experiences of the city space as a migrant or becoming-subject or simply as a flaneur.

With works by: Mano Krach, Swarnaly Mitra Rini, Shuvo Rafiqul, Miae Son, Alexandra Tatar. curated by Alexandra Tatar