Lebt und arbeitet in Wien - Contemporary Art from Vienna

Kunsthalle Wien presents the most extensive survey of the Viennese contemporary art scene organised by the institution in over a decade. For six months, across all of its spaces in the Museumsquartier and Karlsplatz, Lebt und arbeitet in Wien: Contemporary Art from Vienna will bring together over 130 artworks by 56 artists who live and work in Vienna, including painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, performance, sound, film and video. Accompanied by a public programme of talks, performances and events, it places emphasis on the city as a dynamic space of production where art is shaped by a critical approach to the forces of conservatism and a sense of its own agency.

Initially organised by Kunsthalle Wien in 2000, the fifth edition of Lebt und arbeitet in Wien builds upon a longstanding tradition of celebrating Vienna’s lively artistic discourse and diverse community of artists. Curated by Daniel Baumann, Michelle Cotton and Monika Georgieva, it focuses on new and recent works with 38 artists commissioned specifically for the exhibition and numerous artworks presented in Vienna for the first time.

Dario Wokurka (b. 1988, Vienna, Austria) often works according to precise conceptual frameworks, which guide his actions while leaving room for chance and intuition. He creates painterly translations of visual information- allowing distortions, modulations and shifts in meaning to emerge as integral elements of the work, foregrounding how each medium, each language, reshapes what it carries. His source material, usually digital, is mainly selected for its self-reflexive qualities. 

Proposal/Platz der Arbeit (2024) deploys the medium of painting to propose an alternative design for Vienna’s Dr. Karl Lueger Square: keeping only the monument's plinth and renaming the square ‘Platz der Arbeit’ (Square of Labour). Redesigning the central monument to the eponymous former mayor – notorious for his openly anti-Semitic views – was the subject of a public art competition in 2023, to which Wokurka had not been invited. 

Untitled (Kunsthalle '93) (2026) belongs to a series of paintings that the artist produces based on his watercolours. It depicts Kunsthalle Wien’s original building at Karlsplatz in 1993, during the runtime of the exhibition Der zerbrochene Spiegel, a critical survey of the possibilities of painting.

Untitled (Reference Hell-O Extended) (2026) shows a work from Wokurka's Rag Rug Pictures series, in which the artist unravels rag rugs and sews their fabrics into continuous surfaces which he then stretches flat over cotton canvases of corresponding dimensions.

Artists: Brishty Alam, Diana Barbosa Gil, Anna-Sophie Berger, Henning Bohl, Ramesch Daha, Judith Eisler, Scott Clifford Evans, Philipp Fleischmann, Parastu Gharabaghi, Birke Gorm, Jojo Gronostay, Benjamin Hirte, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Emma Hummerhielm Carlén, Iman Issa, Ernst Yohji Jaeger, Lukas Kaufmann, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Bouchra Khalili, Ludwig Kittinger, Jakob Lena Knebl, Sebastian Koeck, James Lewis, Angelika Loderer, Irina Lotarevich, Lazar Lyutakov, Harkeerat Mangat, Wolfgang Matuschek, Till Megerle, Christoph Meier, Rini Mitra, Ute Müller, Michaela Polacek, Lukas Posch, Vika Prokopaviciute, Lucia Elena Průša, Liesl Raff, Shuvo Rafiqul, Hans Schabus, Anna Schachinger, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Katharina Schilling, Toni Schmale, Nora Schultz, Sergey Spirikhin, Lucie Stahl, Josef Strau, Laurence Sturla, Marina Sula, Huda Takriti, Sergei Tcherepnin, Sophie Thun, Johanna Charlotte Trede, Emily Wardill, Dario Wokurka, Min Yoon