Hellbrunner Straße 3
Salzburg 5020
Austria
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 12–7pm
Salzburger Kunstverein proudly presents three exhibitions that inaugurate the institution’s 2026 program CAPTCHA Realism.
Kateryna Lysovenko: Creation, Catastrophe, Creation, Again and Again
March 6–November 29
Ring Gallery
Lysovenko’s painterly intervention in the Ring Gallery unfolds as a loop. Realism is always already unreal (she insists); it only exists as an attempt to show what structures life but does not immediately appear; the forces that build and unbuild the human; the discourses that determine who counts as a body, who belongs to a home, and who deserves to live.
For this site-specific commission, the Ring Gallery’s circular architecture serves as the conceptual and formal armature of the work. The space might read as a gut or a chamber of digestion. At its beginning cells drift across the surface: blood cells, organ cells, fragments of life before identity. For Lysovenko, this level of cellular life precedes the question of citizenship, belonging, or recognition. From the cellular field, the human emerges, but the emergence of the human coincides with the emergence of desire (inseparable from libido, the energy that drives both imagination and survival). Gradually, she adds creatures that hover at the edge of legibility. Are they human? Do they “deserve” life? The question itself is the violence that speaks to the central problem of this exhibition: dehumanization.
The exhibition is generously supported by the ERSTE Foundation.
Linda Lach: all keys, all times
March 6–May 5
Grand Hall
all keys, all times might resemble a waiting room to some viewers; a paradigmatic site of timeless waiting: a place entered because of symptoms one cannot diagnose; a place where one sits between data and decision. One is inside the system, undeniably, but not aligned with its tempo.
all keys, all times stages a somewhat controlled environment, while allowing small disturbances to accumulate. A suspended ceiling element, held as a self-supporting structure within the exhibition architecture is marking out the space. The tightly stretched milky latex suggests protection and restriction at once: a surface that smooths, seals, or holds, while sculptural elements across the space disturb the grid.
The exhibition is realized with the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Institute Vienna.
Madgalena Berger: Certain Expectation
March 6–May 5
Studio
Certain Expectation unfolds from a familiar yet somewhat violent situation: standing in front of a door that does not open. Not because it is broken, not because one has arrived too late, but because access is withheld. Berger’s exhibition takes this moment as both its spatial structure and its conceptual engine. It considers how thresholds are produced, how entry is regulated, and how the promise of participation is distributed unevenly, across bodies, interfaces, and social systems.
Berger reimagines the studio space into a narrow corridor clad in black latex. The material absorbs light, softens sound, and produces a sensation of compression. Moving through the corridor is slow, tactile, and slightly disorienting. It is less a passage than a funnel. At its end stands a closed door. Its influence on the viewer lies in what it withholds.
The exhibitions are commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein and curated by Mirela Baciak. For more details visit our website.
