Natalia del Mar Kašik, Aufsicht, 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.
Anna-Lena Werner: Trinity, Ahmad and Joao, you curated the group exhibition “piercing through” in the Souterrain at DAS WEISSE HAUS in Vienna, which opened during this year’s Vienna Art Week. The show discusses notions of success, while the title frames it as something to break into. What conception of success did you start with?
All: At the beginning, each of us had our own idea of how to approach the topic. But somehow this changed after we met all the artists. We realised that there are urgent issues we need to address when thinking about success. The general tone and voice of the exhibition developed quite organically after exchanging with each artist. Most of them were very transparent and open to sharing their own anxieties and challenges of navigating within the art world. We believed that this was something urgent to acknowledge and an honest and clear backdrop to use for the exhibition to unfold.
Above: Installation view "piercing through" at DAS WEISSE HAUS, 2025; Below: Hanna Kučera, Pos. 16 Performing Professionality, 2025
ALW: A collaboration with Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, you received 55 applications following an open call for the academy’s current students and recent graduates. You selected eight positions for the exhibition. What criteria guided the selection among works?
Trinity Njume-Ebong: Most of the decisions came quite quickly. The main criteria were the relevance to the topic, and the extent to which the connection was genuine in contrast to being forced in order to be included. Next in line was the feasibility, as certain works were still in progress. Finally, one criterion that was decided in the middle of the selection process, was that of offering a first-time opportunity to exhibit at DAS WEISSE HAUS. There were certain artists that we wanted to include but whom had already exhibited in the space. Given the collaboration with the Akademie, we somehow felt a responsibility to offer this exhibition as a first-hand opportunity to artists still making their first exhibition steps. Fairness and opportunity ended up being a much bigger factor than previously anticipated.
João Dias: It was all very collaborative between all three of us and with the participation of Elena Blum of DAS WEISSE HAUS as our project assistant and Anamarija Batista as curatorial supervisor. We were guided by relevancy to the topic of success, different mediums, innovation and how the works connected to each other.
Ahmad Darkhabani: In addition to what my colleagues mentioned, it was very important for us to consider the ability of the artwork to challenge our current understanding of success beyond materialist reward. Whether through the materiality of the work or the critique each piece represents, the selected artworks stand for the idea that success spans a wide range of dimensions, including the pressure to seek validation and the anxieties that shape our behaviour in daily social settings.
Above: Lotti Brockmann, Souvenir (53.64796°N, 8.50909°E), 2024; Below: Sepideh Hassani, picture me in diaspora, 2018
ALW: The open call offered a €300 artist fee. How did you address expectations around production budgets, especially regarding the exhibition theme?
All: Due to the time constraints, the topic of production costs and budget was addressed quite early on, at times before the selection of the artist was even confirmed. It’s worth mentioning that the exhibition budget was quite generous, and we were able to do what we wanted and build the exhibition we envisioned.
ALW: You present works by Lotti Brockmann, Clemens Grömmer, Sepideh Hassani, Natalia del Mar Kašik, Allegra Kortlang, Hanna Kučera, Jana Van Brussel, and Nežka Zamar. The artists’ works touch social, creative, productive, financial, and institutional logics of recognition and success. What spatial or temporal decisions were key to how “success” is read as choreography rather than a static moment?
All: The exhibition starts with two works by Jana Van Brussel and Natalia del Mar Kašik, framing a conceptual understanding of success. The photograph and the film respond to each other as they represent a situation of anxiety and total eagerness to pierce through another world, perhaps the world of success. Then everything becomes performative. Sepideh and Hanna’s work both deal with this idea of “performing” success, albeit using very different aesthetics and environments, one within a corporate setting and the other in a more domestic landscape. Lotti’s installation acts as a kind of synthesis between Hanna and Sepideh, with her part industrial / part organic structures, which transform throughout the exhibition duration outside anyone’s control.
In the next room, Clemens Grömmer flies his constructed surfaces into the public space, while Nežka Zamar performs a trade online. In both works, the artists are questioning the measures rigidly determined by the art market to put a value on art. Finally, the exhibition circles back again to a conceptual standpoint on success. Mirroring Jana’s photograph, the video from Allegra Kortlang stages an absolute collapse of time and space. It opens the physical borders of the exhibition space into a dystopian world destroyed by an endless greed for success.
Above: Jana van Brussel, MOTHS, 2024; Below: Natalia del Mar Kašik, Aufsicht, 2024
ALW: What shared themes and urgencies did you identify across this group—and where were contradictions?
JD: I believe we didn’t find contradictions. All of these artists expressed the desire to be successful, not following the “corporate” and “textbook” idea of success, but success in their own artistic way, like for example Clemens taking his painting outside of the gallery/museum space and having it fly in the wild, damaging it but at the same also showing that success is about resisting, that art as long as it maintains its purpose, it will remain as art even if it’s a “damaged” painting that flew in the wild.
ALW: Nežka Zamar’s work explicitly questions the script of careerism and artistic value by putting her used and vacuum-packed socks on auction. In the video work “Aufsicht” by Natalia del Mar Kašik a museum guard is sent to a white cube room to watch an art work she cannot find, until realising that she is the art work herself. Both works critically show how “success” can be produced by networks and the market value tied to the person of the artist. Did you read these works as refusals of success?
TNE: For me personally, the work that I read most as a “refusal of success” is the work by Clemens Grömmer. Although I see your interpretation with the two other mentioned artworks, their outcome still meet high artistic standards of success. Clemens on the other hand completely rips up the notion of success, puts it inside his mouth, chews it up, spits it back out and displays it within a white cube setting.
JD: I read Natalia’s work as an institutional critique. The work exposes how, within the art world, success is not always tied to only creation, but to recognition and framing, to being watched, named, exhibited. The museum guard becomes successful as art only when her name appears on the wall, as a museum label. Her value, her success, comes only from a label on the wall. I feel this is critical of how sometimes we need a label on the wall of a museum to define what art is, when art is really all around us.
AD: In my view, none of the works actually spoke about the notion of refusal. I see the works we have as a response or even rejections of contemporary economies of success. Rejection, in my view, is not the same as refusal. To think about the refusal of success is really to question the deepest tendencies that make an individual. And this might be super interesting if we want to question what does it mean to “realize one-self” and what kind of parameters are set to achieve this. So let’s say the exhibition is really targeting these parameters, but I would argue that the notion of refusing success deserves its own exhibition.
Clemens Grömmer, Knockin‘ on the Dragon’s Door, 2025
ALW: The mirror work by Sepideh Hassani addresses how personal factors define one’s own success, seen from a diasporic perspective. How much have these questions of situatedness and individual definitions of success played a role in your curatorial definition of the exhibition’s theme?
All: There is a strong personal voice and position in every artwork presented in this exhibition, and for us, this was extremely inspiring. We had interviews with every artist, and we gathered quotes and images that emphasise this personal relation to the work. This material can now be seen in the exhibition booklet. The question of success and being on the threshold of it is also very relevant to us as curators. We were all able to relate to most of the pieces, which made the development of this exhibition particularly enriching. Sepideh’s work is the one which defies most expectations when one initially thinks about “success”. It is a sentimental piece which all three of us could relate to strongly. This work, in particular, opened many discussions that made us connect to the exhibition and the residency itself in a deeper sense.
ALW: Processes of collective curation are more common now than they used to be, albeit being much more complex. As a first-time curatorial trio with different backgrounds, what were the advantages and challenges of this collective authorship?
TNE: We all complemented each other. We come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and artistic communities, but I felt that this acted as a mirror to further understand my own identity, strengths and weaknesses. It also helped me understand how unconventional my curatorial background is and how to further translate it into practice. Given the amount of pressure and labour of this project, tensions were extremely minimal. There was a common immigrant experience that kept us unified and fortified as a team.
JD: For me there were many advantages, since I’m the youngest of the 3 and this is my first big exhibition. I learned a lot with Trinity, Ahmad, Anamarija and the whole DAS WEISSE HAUS team. You never really work alone, even as a solo curator, there’s still the artists and the production team, so teamwork and collaboration are essential.
AD: It was very challenging to combine three perspectives in one exhibition. But what helped us the most was our willingness to discuss small details, even if it took hours and hours. It was very important for each one of us to fully understand what the other curator was trying to say, and then we tried to find a way not to compromise, but to really understand each other’s judgment and then to follow the direction that resonated with all of us.
Allegra Kortlang, Back to the Womb, 2025
ALW: The show concludes the eight-week residency programme Curators’ Agenda: VIENNA 2025*, realized DAS WEISSE HAUS with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under the supervision of Anamarija Batista, that you three were a part of. What was the most formative input the residency gave the exhibition and your curatorial practice?
TNE: Being able to find more precise vocabulary to define my practice, curatorial style and personal tastes. This was never thought about or addressed before until I completed the residency. When one works in a particular way all their life, you start to lose perspective, assuming that it’s the norm; but after completing this residency, I learned that my extremely collaborative approach to working with the artist is not necessarily the standard, but one that makes sense given the type of spaces where most of my earlier projects took place (alternative, occupied, lo-fi, illegal art spaces). I also came to understand more precisely why certain works or practices appeal to more than others.
JD: The presence of Anamarija was great. Having the supervision of an experienced curator was essential with advice that we were struggling with, like connections between the works or the positions of it.
AD: I truly appreciate how this residency gave us the space to work, think, and produce. A great deal of time, effort, and resources were invested in creating conditions that allowed us to reflect on the artists’ work and consider how to present it in the best possible way. I learned a lot and was able to build relationships that I hope will develop into new collaborations in the near future.
Nežka Zamar, FEMALE, 30–40, CAUCASIAN (WHITE), SLIM / SLENDER, US 6, UK 4, EU 37, 2025
ALW: Looking ahead, how do you imagine curatorial practices evolving—especially collective models—given tightening resources and algorithmic attention economies?
TNE: This may sound like a naive answer but I hope that these challenges that you mention will only push curatorial practices towards something more innovative, DIY and out-of-the-box. I believe curating has become a slightly stuffy, academic and institutional term; and I am personally in favour of having more artist-run curatorial practices / spaces without any middle men. It will most likely be the only solution either way seeing the way arts funding is headed.
JD: Collective models are a very valid way of curating. The most important thing I believe is the curators, the institution and the artists agreeing with the values and the message the exhibition is trying to put out there –– the curators, institutions and artists form a collective voice trying to express what they believe and the result is the exhibition.
AD: It is difficult for me at this moment to speculate on how curatorial practice will evolve. We are living in a time of profound uncertainty, and things are shifting rapidly. Art will inevitably respond to these changes, and we, in turn, will have to rethink how we present art and how we speak about it. But within all these uncertainties, the role of the curator remains clear to me: it is about finding a language that articulates what art has to say about us in this particular moment in time.
eSeL.at, Sara Tasha, "piercing through” exhibition opening, DAS WEISSE HAUS, Vienna, 08.11.2025. From left to right: Ahmad Darkhabani (Curator), Trinity Njume-Ebong (Curator), Ingeborg Erhart (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), Anamarija Batista (Supervisor), João Dias (Curator), Nevena Janković (BLOCKFREI Collective, DAS WEISSE HAUS)* “Curators' Agenda was initiated in 2015 by the Vienna-based association BLOCKFREI and is an annual residency program that offers international curators the opportunity to expand their curatorial knowledge and to engage with the Viennese art scene over the course of eight weeks. In January 2024, the BLOCKFREI Collective (Nevena Janković, Eva Kovač, and Jana Dolečki) took over the management of DAS WEISSE HAUS and integrated this residency project into its program.”
piercing through