INTERVIEW: "PIERCING THROUGH"

Natalia del Mar Kašik, Aufsicht, videostill, 2024

In piercing through, a current group exhibition at DAS WEISSE HAUS developed within the Curators’ Agenda: VIENNA 2025, the curators Trinity Njume-Ebong, Ahmad Darkhabani and João Dias turn their attention to a concept that exerts persistent pressure on artistic lives and institutions alike—success. Working with eight emerging artists selected through an open call at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the curatorial trio examines how success is produced, performed, and contested—across institutions, markets, diasporic trajectories and personal biographies—amid shrinking cultural budgets and a rightward political shift that increasingly pressures the art field. Their exhibition moves between conceptual, performative and materially experimental approaches, addressing how value and recognition circulate today. In conversation with Anna-Lena Werner, the curators discuss their criteria, collective process, and how navigating a residency shaped their thinking about the urgencies of this moment.

INTERVIEW: BASSAM ISSA AL-SABAH & JENNIFER MEHIGAN

 "Uncensored Lilac" (still) HD CGI Film (2024) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah & Jennifer Mehigan.

In this conversation with artists Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, we discuss “Biolytic Daughter”, their collaborative exhibition at VSSL Studio in London (6–30 November 2025), which unfolds within the programme “Entanglements of the Apocalypse”. Emerging from their collaborative film project “Uncensored Lilac,” the exhibition expands their shared world of digital mythology and queer sensuality into sculptural and spatial forms. Our discussion traces the feverish, ironic tenderness at the heart of their collaboration and how they navigate the blurred boundaries between beauty and collapse, digital desire and embodied decay. We also speak about working with Carefuffle––a disability- and queer-led working group rooted in the principles of care, interconnectedness, authorship and social justice––who have been supporting VSSL Studio and the artists in making the exhibition as accessible as possible. This collaboration has opened up new ways of thinking about care and access as integral to artistic production rather than as an afterthought.

“Entanglements of the Apocalypse” is a transdisciplinary programme exploring queer and trans imaginaries of world-building in response to ongoing collapse, co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton at VSSL Studio in London. Grounded in research and collective practice, it resists capitalist and colonial framings of apocalypse as an end, instead approaching it as a continuous condition, a site for transformation, intimacy, and speculative renewal.

INTERVIEW: FLORIAN DOMBOIS

Florian Dombois, Triple Instruments, 2019, Photo: Florian Amoser, ZHdK

In this interview, Florian Dombois and I reflect on his pioneering role in the field of artistic research and the path that led him there. “I had doubts about geophysics and the approach of the natural sciences from the very first semester, but I couldn't bring myself to drop out,” he says, looking back on the beginning of his studies. I have been working with Florian as his research assistant and co-curator of the annual Wind Tunnel Festival at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since 2022. Together with our colleague Berit Seidel from the artists collective U5, we explore strategies, methods, and formats of being-in-the-world within our academic and artistic practices. Florian has been an artist and professor in the Research Focus on Transdisciplinarity at ZHdK since 2012, where he leads artistic research projects and founded an artistic PhD program. His artistic practice dates back to the 1990s, the founding years of artistic research. For us, it seemed a fitting moment to reflect on Florian’s work and take a step back to consider the early introduction of what is now a highly discussed field — artistic research.

INTERVIEW: MANOR GRUNEWALD

 Manor Grunewald, "Re-Painting Class Studio" 2025, all images © the artist 

In the exhibition “Timeline Samples” at Berthold Pott Gallery in Cologne, Belgian artist Manor Grunewald revisits his own painterly archive, reconfiguring earlier works through processes of sampling, reproduction, and self-referencing. By integrating techniques from both amateur painting manuals and digital printing technologies, his practice interrogates the circulation of visual knowledge and the construction of artistic authorship — turning painting into a recursive, self-referencing system. In this conversation, Grunewald reflects on how the studio informs his decisions in exhibition-making, how intuition and iteration shape his process, and how the boundaries between professional and pedagogical image economies begin to dissolve.