curated by 2025, “Fragmented Subjectivity”

Curated by brings together a selection of Vienna’s contemporary galleries and supports them to put on shows built around a guiding theme. The 16th annual edition, unfolding amid growing ideological divides in Austria and an increasingly fractured collective perception of these and other crises globally, takes “fragmented subjectivity” as the title. 1 According to an accompanying essay, fragmentation is framed, here, as a condition of contemporary life and also as a way to “give form to contradictory thinking.”

A generic white plastic bag attached to a motorized fan on the skylight roof at Gianni Manhattan spins rhythmically. The SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) inside half-fills the bag, giving it a jellyfish-like form that appears vulnerable, but holds its shape as it swings round and round. Bianca Hlywa’s The Image of the Tide (2017) is maintained daily by the staff, an acknowledgement of our connectivity and reliance on one another. Its steady oscillation sets the pace for a tour through the city. Symbiosis and reciprocity continue in Moe Yoshida’s puppet works, assembled from feathers, coffee grounds, and other found materials. During a demonstration, Yoshida, with the help of curator Simone Menegoi and an assistant, moved one of the figures, Frog Dog (2021) to the sidewalk outside Gregor Podnar, and back inside again. It was a delicate procedure with all three (or four?) working closely together. The care required to animate this dainty anthropomorphic sculpture turned their repetitive choreographed moves into a meditation on interdependence. At Charim, set to Ceal Foyer’s sound piece that weaves Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” was an exploration of routine and the tedium of life. Paintings by Noémie Degen and Simon Jaton (Untitled #6, 2024) and Alexandra Noel (Train, 2025) approximated motion while offering up still, quiet moments of contemplation.

A group show curated by DJ Hellerman at Kandlhofer brought together artists who embrace ambiguity, asking the viewer to look again at what they are presented with, and ask questions. “Shored Against My Ruins” features Franco Andrés, whose oneiric, multi-part paintings contain worlds that hold, on a fine line, both lived experience and memory. Andrés suggests narratives that overlap and repeat, that are never fully resolved, and that make us consider shifts in perspective as the eye travels across the panels. A lot of shows encourage this seepage, as with “BEEP!” at Sophie Tappeiner, where it’s not clear where one artist’s work ends and another’s begins, or if the muffled sound playing on the speaker in sporadic bursts is timed or triggered by my bag bumping into the stanchions. A couple more brushes with the work (Pasaporteman and Opo’s Border Energy, 2025) proved it to be a case of the latter. Everyone who came into the gallery had to walk within the confines outlined by the chains, providing a counterpoint to the show’s non-delineated curation. 

Not every show's discordance felt intentional. The sheer volume of works in a vast group exhibition, “Telepathy Curating presents: Teases and Synthesis; Empty Threats, Vienna Love and Anxiety Reality Paradoxes,” stretching across City Galerie and Layr, was overwhelming. In contrast, at Krobath—one of the few galleries that showed only one artist—Simon Schubert’s series of folded paper drawings rewarded a close look. Executed across fifteen sheets of folded paper, his series Bay Window Light (2024) gradually revealed, with nearly imperceptible shifts of light and shadow, the effect of the sun as it moved through a room over the course of the day. In a less subtle move, Schubert used the paper fold technique to wallpaper an entire room, expanding the space apparently infinitely.

“The Desert Has No Shadow,” curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Wejdan Reda at Galerie Krinzinger, offered another form of intimate, reflective viewing. Here, the desert is more than just a desolate and empty place; it holds many forms of life, present and past, within its arid terrain. The herbaceous scents blooming from Sara Abdu’s stacked soaps (Now That I’ve Lost You In My Dreams, Where Do We Meet? 2021) fill the rooms, recalling memories of lost loved ones. Toward the end of my tour around the city, I come across Nina Beier’s Beast (2024) at Croy Nielsen, a mechanical bull carrying breast milk substitute on its back, which I imagine bucking and turning in step with The Image of the Tide. Both act as mobile, uncanny organisms. They create a bridge across the city, suggesting that repetition and dependence circulate across these sites and between us.

The fragmented subjectivity spoken of here is both a symptom of contemporary conditions and a way through which, by engaging with contradictions, we can understand the present. Curated by is supported by the city, and that vote of confidence in its art scene allows for ambitious programs that gather many curators and artists around this loose theme. As works articulate motion and stillness, the psychic and the material, memory and imagination, presence and absence, resonances begin to emerge on their own. Across Vienna, the shows generate a collective rhythm that is fragile, repetitious, and, like the milk-carrying mechanical bull and the spinning plastic bag jellyfish, improbably alive.