Holding Space - finissage

Program:

• 16:00 Guided tour by curators of the exhibition Flóra Gadó and Judit Szalipszki
   
• 17:00 Film Screening 
  Rob Crosse: Wood for the Trees (2023), 13 min.
  Melanie Gilligan: Home Together (2020-2022), Episode 1 and 3, approx. 45 min.
  
  The following screening program will highlight themes which are related to the exhibition but are not omnipresent in the exhibited artworks. Rob Crosse’s film, Wood for the Trees (2023) explores systems of support that place value on inter-generational exchange and communication, drawing connections between a queer multi generational housing project in Berlin and a group of scientists gathering data in an old growth forest.
  
  Home Together (2020-22) by Melanie Gilligan is an episodic video series that focuses on communities of older people who decide to live collectively and look out for one another in their aging years. The film is a docu-fiction drama that looks at the situations of aging people finding ways to fight isolation in a society that marginalizes people who are older and it also looks at other related issues that impact older people.
   
• 18:00 Eva Koťátková: The Unrooted: Sleeping Women Going to Battle, 2022
  Eva Koťátková’s installation will be activated by the performer Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir. The artist, who considers her textile artworks also as wearable costumes, often invites performers to inhabit and embody the pieces. In the installation the heads, plants and other hybrid beings are shown as half-sleeping, half-awake entities, focusing not only on the restorative quality of sleep but on the imaginary realms of dreams and the subconscious as well. The activation is also in relation to that, as certain dream scenarios that are also part of the installation, will be recited.

Holding Space

Artists: Özlem Altin, Katarína Csányiová, Every Ocean Hughes, Eva Koťátková, Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, Rory Pilgrim, Finnegan Shannon, P Staff, Dorottya Vékony, Sophie Utikal, What Would an HIV Doula Do?, Anna Witt

Curated by Flóra Gadó and Judit Szalipszki

How can we be companions of ourselves and each other, perform acts of mutual care, and hold space for one another? The exhibition applies the concept and practice of the doula as a framework to examine how our relationship towards the notion of care has changed in the past years and what forms of individual and collective responses can we decipher.

The practice of the doula contains both a pragmatic as well as a spiritual understanding of transitional periods, such as infertility, birth, (chronic) illness, dying, grievance, as well as gendertransition or migration. The doula is a figure that accompanies people or communities during these in-between periods, assisting the rites of transition (for it to be smooth, efficient, yet personal and intimate) and holds space for those who are in need. Doulas connect different spaces and temporalities of becomings; the different realms of the unborn, the ill, the dead and the not-yet.

Primarily understood in a medical context, a doula is a trained professional who provides expert guidance for the service of others and supports another person (or communities) through significant, often life-changing experiences. The doula’s goal and role is to help the client feel safe and comfortable. The exhibition project regards this figure in an extended/expanded context, one that helps us understand and acknowledge our interdependence in a political as well as an ecological sense. It highlights the significance of subjective and personal, of individual and communal experiences, and the potential of subverting the status quo of hegemonic/formal institutions by questioning the (epistemic) injustices inherent to these systems and proposing alternatives.
 

With the support of Tschechisches Zentrum Vienna and Collegium Hungarcium Vienna

The art education programme is funded by the OeAD with funds from the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.