Gesamtkunstwerk where painting, architecture, and philosophy converge: the ceiling of the Musiksalon in Franz von Stuck’s Villa Stuck. The deep purple-blue ceiling unfolds like an astral theater, an ancient atrium reimagined for the modern bourgeois imagination. Through its painted red framework, the viewer’s gaze ascends toward a firmament festooned with stars, zodiac signs, and a comet. An electric chandelier glows at the center like an artificial sun, binding mythic symbolism to the industrial optimism of the late 19th century.
The effect is contemplative as well as theatrical, animating the ceiling as a sitewhere cosmic order and social hierarchy reflect one another. This celestial architecture performs ideology as much as it produces wonder, translating metaphysical harmony into the aesthetics of possession. On the night that visitors entered for the Villa’s reopening, the Musiksalon revealed its own paradox: harmony as aspiration and disguise, a space where art’s utopian promise meets the historical realities of privilege and power.
Fig.1
There is no cosmological order, however, without chaos. The ceiling’s structured harmony contrasts sharply with the exuberant wall paintings and inscriptions throughout the Musiksalon, embodying Friedrich Nietzsche’s opposition of the Apollonian and Dionysian creative impulses. Yet beyond philosophical abstraction, the Musiksalon bears the material weight of class and power: Villa Stuck was a site of elite display, a monument to bourgeois taste and the commodification of art. Celebrated by audiences even as critics such as Julius Meier-Graefe derided its ostentation, von Stuck’s work became a paradoxical emblem of aesthetic power intertwined with structural hierarchy. Into this charged space enter Chicks on Speed—the transgressive, femmepunk, Eurotrash collective—whose intervention is both performative and Marxist in orientation. They activate a tension between historical and contemporary cosmologies: i.e., the Athenean, grounded in strategic intellect and critical reflection, and the Sapphic, rooted in desire, collaboration, and sensual sorority. By inhabiting and reconfiguring the Villa’s grandeur, Chicks on Speed stage a material critique of cultural authority, exploring how utopian visions must be reimagined through collective experimentation, aesthetic revolt, and embodied solidarity. In this sense, the exhibition’s title, “Utopia”, names a space of ethical and political negotiation where chaotic and institutional forces collide and reconcile, creating conditions for transformation. This alignment between rebellion and reflection becomes explicit in Chicks on Speed’s own declaration of utopianism:
If you are one of these people who don’t have a Utopia on your mind, you’re caught in ice age 3, you’re caught in a trap, you got no turning back […] Utopia is a mirror of multiple imagined worlds, COBRA, Fluxus, Feminism gave us paradise a ‘perfect’ place […] Better living, wishful thinking, […] [C]hange your wallpaper and everything will be great! Create a perfect harmony for the self and all the rest, virtual versus real space, no place, no space […] The Glory days are over […] The dream was just a hoax.
Here, utopia is channeled as a network of imaginaries, a reflective tool that reveals both desire and limitation. It resonates with the Villa’s celestial cosmos while critiquing the seductive illusions of perfection that once marked bourgeois ideology. Chicks on Speed turn utopia into praxis: experimental, performative, and critically playful, a terrain where social hierarchies, economic structures, and technological mediation are collectively reworked. Their words above frame the exhibition as a cosmological exploration of praxis, inviting viewers to inhabit possibilities rather than to consume certainties.
The Musiksalon’s walls depict this ideological tension. Orpheus, with his lyre, embodies Apollonian harmony and virtue, while Pan represents Dionysian ecstasy and freedom. Stuck’s early works, such as Eavesdropping (1890) and Ring Dance (1899), integrate into the decorative matrix, establishing a canonical lineage that underscores its elite ideological function. Chicks on Speed remind us that cosmology— whether celestial, cultural, or social—is always co-constructed, negotiated between past and present, power and desire, hierarchy and solidarity. Mirroring this space of historical grandeur and ideological weight is UKRAiNATV, the experimental internet TV station founded in Kraków in 2022. Positioned across digital and physical realms, UKRAiNATV functions as a “glocal” platform for live performance, collaborative research, and activist intervention. Within the Villa Stuck, its presence in the museum is more than technical: it is a material critique of inherited authority. Chicks stuff the exhibition’s entrance with a collection of garments—once designed by Stuck as his own atelier—UKRAiNATV transforms spectators into participants, collapsing hierarchies between artist and audience, historical legacy and contemporary praxis.
Fig.2
The visual and allegorical layers of this vast costume ball reinforce the show’s critique of inequality. Francesca Albanese’s face, printed in neon yellow and painted on a batik robe and surrounded by tarot motifs, snakes, and third eyes, functions as more than ornamentation. She appears as a goddess within this historical and ideological architecture, embodying Sapphic cultural associations while asserting authority over a space that once celebrated masculine genius and bourgeois privilege. The Albanese-as-goddess positioning becomes a material intervention in the Villa’s cosmology, reclaiming the ceremonial and symbolic for feminist and collectivist ends. Through invoking her presence, Chicks on Speed channel the Villa’s historical weight and propose a reconfigured cosmology in which gender, collectivity, and radical leisure are central.
Intersecting with the deified Albanese is the narrative of the Global Sumud Flotilla, whose crashed boat-cum-stage occupies a liminal space in the erstwhile atelier rooms of the Villa Stuck. The flotilla, an act of international solidarity, references global struggles against displacement, militarization, and inequality. Its presence in the space transposes these themes into the Villa’s aesthetic register and historical frame. The boat’s suspended wreckage serves as both monument and stage, materializing failure, resistance, and precariousness. Here, Chicks on Speed juxtapose the villa’s opulence with the realities of collective struggle: the grandeur of bourgeois architecture against the violence of global imperial capitalism. The wrecked flotilla becomes a theatrical translation of a material enactment of utopia-in-practice, where solidarity and improvisation emerge as both conceptual and political strategies.
Conceptual art provides a final lens for reflection in the show. Mladen Stilinović’s photographic performance Artist at Work (1978), documenting himself sleeping and resting in exhibition spaces, critiques capitalist imperatives of productivity and valorizes inactivity as a form of resistance. In dialogue with Chicks on Speed’s contributions, Stilinović’s work resonates as a materialist, anti-capitalist gesture: it challenges the very logic of labor that underpinned Villa Stuck’s original project where art and architecture reinforced bourgeois authority. Placing Stilinović’s work in the final room transforms this retrospective from historical survey to ethical proposition. Visitors are invited to inhabit the radical cosmology that Chicks on Speed cultivate: one in which collective action, experimentation, and pleasure constitute critique and legacy.
//
- Images
Cover: Chicks on Speed, Utopia, 2025. © and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Wolf-Dieter Grabner
Fig.1 Chicks on Speed, Utopia, Wheel of Fleeting Fortunes, 2025, Courtesy: Leslie_Johnson
Fig.2 Chicks on Speed, Utopia, 2025
