Mikołaj Sobczak and Tania Gheerbrant

From May 16 to July 13, Salzburger Kunstverein proudly presents two new exhibitions that continue the institution’s 2025 Program Picturing Justice.

Mikołaj Sobczak: Moon, Sun, Mercury
Grand Hall

Mikołaj Sobczak’s exhibition Moon, Sun, Mercury assembles a fractured history of resistance, propaganda, and survival. Across three large-scale paintings and subtle footnotes, Sobczak draws from communist posters, esoteric traditions, queer archives, and contemporary technofeudal critiques to sketch a portrait of power and its breakdown.

The exhibition is not organized around grand historical narratives or mythic timelines; instead, it stages a choreography of protagonists—queer activists, exiles, revolutionaries, outlaws—whose entangled lives reveal the fractures of history and the unfinished work of resistance.

Sobczak’s approach is one where images collide, symbols fracture, and narratives tangle into dense constellations. Painting becomes both tool and weapon, exposing how history is written, distorted, and sometimes reclaimed. The painter himself is not separate from these histories; he is implicated within it, caught between the forces he tries to reveal and those he cannot fully escape.

Moon, Sun, Mercury is a practice in assembling counter-histories. It is also, more urgently, a rehearsal of anti-fascist aesthetics for a present in which the battle over images, narratives, and bodies remains very far from over.

Opening: May 16, 2025 8pm, followed by the performance Anti-Fascist Art Manifesto by Mikołaj Sobczak in the context of wild thinX: non-conformist practices in architecture, design, and art.

The exhibition is commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Republic of Poland.

Tania Gheerbrant: Social Insecurity
Studio

In Social Insecurity, Tania Gheerbrant stages a material confrontation with the long history of mental health as a tool of social control. Drawing connections between the witch hunts of early modern Europe, the birth of psychiatric institutions, and the systemic repression of marginalized communities today, her exhibition examines how ideas of “normalicy” have always served political ends — and how they continue to shape the precarious architectures of solidarity.

The reference to Thomas Szasz’s critique of psychiatric power frames the exhibition, but Tania moves beyond his writing to activate a living history. Rather than treating archives as static repositories, she treats them as raw material: petals for sculptural lamps, textures for murals, verses for collective reading. Her method refuses the clinical gaze, instead reassembling stories of resistance among those labeled mad.

As states retreat into privatized, individualistic models of care, and as new forms of authoritarianism encroach on daily life, the question Gheerbrant raises in Social Insecurity is blunt: who will be left to die quietly next time? In tracing the continuities between witch hunts, fascist psychiatric abuses, and contemporary “managed” insecurity, she makes clear that what is at stake is not only mental health, but the very conditions of collective life.

Opening: May 16, 2025 8pm

The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with Frac Bretagne, Rennes. Tania Gheerbrant is the winner of the Frac Bretagne—Art Norac Award 2024.

The exhibitions are curated by Salzburger Kunstverein’s director Mirela Baciak.