Independent Space Index 2024 kicked off in Vienna on a Thursday evening at the end of May, with 52 of the network’s 90 listed spaces opening their doors to the public over one weekend, rather than the appointment-only or irregular opening hours by which many normally operate. Anticipation ensued.
Plotting an itinerary was made significantly easier by the free printed brochures distributed throughout the city, recognizable by the blurred red and white oval halo repeat pattern across their covers. This was in addition to a clever website to help those uninitiated in the ways of Vienna (myself) navigate neighborhood clusters and state which spaces had events on which days.
Based on these guides, Thursday night offered a smooth 6th District run, with the exhibition Autorn opening at WAF, a film screening and book launch at Salon für Kunstbuch, and the exhibition Mermaid & Seafruit at Ve.Sch. Respective friends, fans, and social circles can arrive, linger, depart, refuel at Mcdonald's, then re-arrive at leisure, text friends along the way, or look at Instagram to see what’s up and make a plan to unite at the next space. Most locals know that Ve.Sch is where finales typically occur on Thursday nights in Vienna, and where the cocktail mixing of the owners’ (probably extensive) repertoire of hobbies turned skills, can be experienced.
Fig.1
Earlier in the day, I visited one space that I had been looking forward to visiting for the first time, Prosopopeia. The name refers to a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates by speaking as another person or object. This project space was initiated by Inga Charlotte Thiel, who came across the American-based artist JJJJJerome Ellis while working at PW Magazine and later invited him for this exhibition. The multiple J’s in Ellis’ first name refers to the stutter he lives with and which his works often are informed by, incorporating it into his written and visual poetry as well as his performances. Working not despite but rather because of his stuttered speech, Ellis contests the “social regime of fluency”, finding another rhythm through spoken word within which time is created by the moments in between. I thought of Fred Moten saying: “Anyone who can’t help but deviate can pretty much tell me anything.” A sequence of photos of the artist in the woods references the idea of a “clearing” in the forest where one happens upon a meadow, analogous to clearings as “ever-present clarity” as the exhibition text notes or moments of silence during a speech when one is trying to figure out the next word. On a perpendicular wall to the photos, poems formed in scores rather than stanzas are hung without frames. The soundtrack to the exhibition of Ellis’ meandering images is a spoken word performance emanating from speakers near a corner with a short shelf holding an intuitive selection of books. It was refreshing not to gauge any formal or obvious concept behind the book selection, instead, I felt a sense of reflected pride in recognizing some friends’ publications, as well as relief in finding authors and titles that I had searched for in Vienna but could not locate. With JJJJJerome’s language punctuating the background, the opportunity to sit and peruse the shelf to the beat and unexpected breaks reflects an intimacy only an independent art space can evoke.
Fig.2
Accurately self-described as a bookshop, host, and exhibition space, Prosopopeia is located within a Gemeindebau, the name given to Vienna’s social housing, with the artist and neighbors forming parts of the same milieu. To make use of available and affordable space in Vienna as an opportunity for offering literature and printed matter otherwise unavailable in the city is just one of the myriad ways independent spaces provide alternatives within the social system. This kind of space repurposing serves the city’s changing demographic of artists, writers, readers, and scholars, or, in other words, comrades and peers. While I was sitting near the window engaging in the aforementioned texting well before dusk, a friend approached and we chatted about her new, bigger, studio space. “So I’m going to become a painter now,” she laughed. The time and space provided by Vienna’s relative affordability make it possible to develop long-nascent art practices. In some other major cities’ artistic scenes such as in New York, and even now in Berlin, continuing an art practice often means figuring out how to commercialize it in another industry. Vienna’s infrastructure also makes it possible for people to come into art later in life, and to understand the artistic side of their work in other fields, or to develop practices quietly without the pressures of chasing visibility for the sole purpose of selling work.
The fluidity of artistic practice and space in Vienna encompasses literal mobility. Sophia Hatwagner’s space called VAN opened in 2020 inside a gifted Dacia. With a constructed white cube inside a minivan, Hatwagner could have her own mobile space while attending to her new daughter, thus playing with and circumventing the restrictions of the white cube and the need to regularly attend openings as required for building an artist’s social and cultural capital. Part institutional critique, part experiment with temporal and financial modes, the exhibitions the space holds vary widely in form and content. This is reflective of VAN’s concept of privileging mobility over fixed identity. Understood as a “nomadic” space, VAN rejects any stable form, and instead embraces an independent space’s loose requirements, with no demands to adhere to material promises. It can morph according to a moment’s needs, as a response or a survival skill, without imposing what art should look like and where it should be found.
Fig.3
For the festival artist, Stefan Pani presented (Curatorial Exile), through which a meta-narrative appears to critique the ideology that lies beneath the white cube. The work is part of his larger project Post-Innovation. According to Pani’s Post-innovative staging, “the core of the curatorial agenda, as well as the individual contributions is to generate relevance through value production in the realm of autonomous spaces,” Pani is referencing Boris Groys’ concept of artistic innovation. Pani’s ‘individual contributions’ are those made by three fictional artists, whose roles seem to be to amplify the meta relationship of the white cube in a van, as well as to raise questions of authorship. With the aid of a text revealing a sequence of events that make up Post-innovative Staging, including the introduction of a rag and an identical van, the presumed curatorial text of (Curatorial Exile) raises an inevitable question: at which point does the institutionalization of new spaces, which demand both their independence and aesthetic autonomy, become apparent? Could this also allude to the festival’s potential institutionalization of the decentralized scene?
Vienna’s independent scene is not exactly fringe, but rather a network running in parallel with, and occasionally running into, the city’s institutionalized and galleried art world. Still, like in any network, with the social aspect comes cultural codes that you either get or you don’t, or which you learn over a process of initiation and rehearsal from each others’ networked positions. In general, Vienna’s independent space scene has evolved not solely to subvert the closed bourgeois circuits of the art world, but also by incident, by way of finding loopholes through which to bypass imposing societal orders, hierarchies of dominant values, politics, and culture. Through proverbial handshakes, the handing over of keys, and the trusting of someone else to lock up, networks are built on trust and word of mouth, where aesthetics, rhetoric, and spatial organization are linked more to chance and informal communities than to established forms of gatekeeping. Being discreet is a necessity when the figures of friend, lover, colleague, collector, or gallerist are regularly interchangeable. Yet unlike other art worlds, the independent space scene does not appear to discriminate based on social status. As a friend, an established artist in Vienna for 20 years, put it, “Everyone talks about each other, but everyone likes each other.” These are the deliberate acts of organized creativity and conscious interactions that make a scene desirable in the first place. It is not premised on immediate exclusion, but rather on a built trust, and such trust has to be earned.
Fig.4
Trust also has to be given, which is the case in Laura Hinrichsmeyer’s show Autorn at WAF, a space that shows the work of emerging artists in Vienna. Without the guise of theory to mediate or dress up the work, the show, which features textured paintings and an elevator sculpture revealing the floor beneath the space, trusts both the artist as well as the viewer. So much so that the exhibition text, written by Leonie Huber, plays with this notion, asking, “my role is unclear: am I part of this grouping or did I join later?”, and “[Could I] speak for you and claim that we are sharing the same experience[?] An offer of identification that is an invitation to be rejected.” To look at work and read a text risking formats questioning their very existence is freeing, as it feels unencumbered by stakes that might exist in other art scenes, where anything outside of expectations renders the work illegible. After all, how do we make sense of avant-garde movements if art is only allowed to be talked about or understood the way self-proclaimed experts who studied, but never experienced, tell us it should be?
The desire to pin down the existence of something, especially in art, is an age-old pastime that has taken on novel forms from corporate branding to epistemological hegemonies, yet it remains one that an organization such as an independent space can unconsciously or actively evade. Salon für Kunstbuch, for example, is the artist Bernard Cella’s project of collected books. Behind a sliding wall in the main visitors’ space is another storage space. On the opposite side, an open space behind the table of cake slices that Cella has also made is yet another room for storing books that looks and feels more like a studio. Cella’s practice, which reflects the collection and is also reflected within the collection, engages forms such as photography and installation, yet cannot be categorized, though labels such as participatory art and institutional critique have been applied. Salon für Kunstbuch is not a bookstore; it’s closer to an archive, though it is also possible to purchase from the collection, many of which have been published by the Salon itself. Other books exist for inspiration, almost all of them considered rare, reflecting the genuine passion of its collector. This becomes evident when speaking with Cella who is eager to share his knowledge and the stories behind a given title’s place in the greater collection. One has a feeling that there is some internal methodology to locating any of the 6000 books held in the space that is unbeknownst to anyone except Cella, who has an apparent propensity for constant reorganization and rearrangement of the collection’s layout, which by the look of one wall, includes being arranged by cover color.
Fig.5
While the independent space has the potential to subvert typical demands made by the institutionalized or commercial art substructures, it can also hold space for artistic positions left out or unfitting within these structures’ prescribed conditions.
In March, school, a space for performative screenings located in the 5th district, screened Marwa Arsanions’ Who is Afraid of Ideology? (2019) an ongoing series of films about forms of self-organization and resistance against exploitation and repression within structures of patriarchy, the state, and capitalism. This series was conceived in the context of a simultaneous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien at Karlsplatz, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman’s Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023). Unable to hold the series at the Kunsthalle, school was asked by the exhibition’s curator to host Arsanios’ series. In the past, school has also taken on a curatorial role for art institutions such as Belvedere 21, with their film program Über das Neue (2023), screening films from artists such as Hannah Black, Firas Shehadeh, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Friedl vom Gröller, Anahita Asadifar, and Jumana Manna. On the Friday evening of the Independent Space Festival, school screened Huda Takriti’s film, Fluid Grounds (2023), a film reflecting on France’s colonial past by following digital practices of remembrance and contestation of the French settlers in Algeria known as pieds-noirs. Today, people who identify as part of the pieds-noirs use platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to circulate images and connect through nostalgia over a shared sense of birthright in Algeria during French colonial occupation before Algeria’s independence in 1962. The exhibition is not merely a documentation of the pieds-noirs' online activities and different ideologies. Rather, seen through Takriti’s exploration of memory as premised on the gaze of colonial oppression, the exhibition’s film and photo collage ultimately question these images’ subsequent historiography.
Fig.8
Such a nuanced approach to interpreting imagery seems only possible in a space that likewise intuits its existence based on current relevance and an active community dedicated to engaging in topics that might be shut down elsewhere. In fact, of the independent spaces I visited, the school was the only one taking a defined political position. While decolonization is talked around in Vienna, there is no developed discourse on its applications. The country though, is by no means clear of oppression – where the topic is ready at hand in its capital cities just by way of the social interactions existing every day on the streets. Or maybe it is because the Viennese are used to the good life and want to keep it that way. With no desire to conflate the Viennese elite with the working class or the immigrant population in Austria, a newcomer such as myself can only hypothesize this glaring blindspot. However, for many, the lack of this kind of discursive cultural or artistic production can lead to an accusation of Vienna being provincial, slow, or left behind. Then again, to immediately glom on – with no self-reflection – to the global West’s liberal discursive production would reinforce the cultural hegemony of cities in countries with histories of colonization. For school to now exist in its 13th year based on an inner knowledge that there are critical topics in danger of not being addressed at all, or which are at risk of falling into capricious hands, cements its essential position within Vienna’s constellation of independent spaces. That position exists not because it is trying to hold on to it, but instead, because the position is used to create space for urgent conversations that otherwise would not exist.
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Fig.7
On an independent space high, and feeling inspired to see more than I could digest, I drifted through the city on my bike, going toward the 2nd, then to the 20th, then back through the 1st. What makes its decentralized art scene so accessible, in part, is Vienna’s size. In other cities with seemingly bigger art scenes, people often move only within limited familiar circuits. Knowing that no bike ride would exceed 40 minutes, I felt uninhibited by distance, with a piqued curiosity to go beyond what would normally be on my radar. The bike rides in between also afforded time to reflect on what conditions, exactly, enable a decentralized art scene. Does naming an independent space an Independent Space in fact centralize the concept under this very title? I thought about how after George Maciunas named Fluxus some members felt he undid the very meaning of Fluxus. How is it possible, then, to bring attention to a loose network of artists and spaces whose very existence is premised on impulse and not necessarily obeying the functions of an organized festival? Is external visibility necessary or important to a scene that operates mostly within its own circles, where the artists are also the audience and the founders, and ostensibly, the PR forces, of the spaces? Or is the Vienna independent scene destined to remain insular, where dissolution is inherent before any space gets absorbed by a system that would remove the very fluidity that defines it? If the role of the independent space is to distance itself from art with the capitalist entanglements, to which it has become intrinsically and paradoxically bound, how do we locate its position in the legacy of informal artistic networks?
The weekend ended softly, with no festival-wide finissage, or defined location of where to hang. This is very much in keeping with the scene’s tenets: spontaneous, and based on mood. I pedaled on my bike, casually running reds on Sunday evening as the weather finally began to clear, to Loggia, a final stop to see the last day of their exhibition Ringen. Among meticulous drawings referencing histories of wrestling, Ringen featured a video about jiu-jitsu in Texas with an actual jiu-jitsu mat placed before the screen and touched on a subculture that, when framed in the art exhibition context, abstracts masculinity through a tender gaze while evoking an improvised choreography. As the curator’s tie-dyed T-shirt read: keep jiu jitsu gay. It was a pleasant feeling to end the weekend with and I left ready to ride into the sunset. But then a text message appeared from a colleague who had also finished a weekend of independent space touring:
We found a place to go, you can eat and drink, and smoke there.
Independent Space Index 2025 will take place May 30 - June 1, 2025. You can find more information about the initiative at www.independentspaceindex.at
- Footnotes
Cover © Nikola Hergovich
Fig.1 Ve.Sch © Flavio Palasciano
Fig.2 Prosopopeia © Flavio Palasciano
Fig.3 VAN © Flavio Palasciano
Fig.4 WAF © Flavio Palasciano
Fig.5 Salon für Kunstbuch © Flavio Palasciano
Fig.6 school © Flavio Palasciano
Fig.7 © Nikola Hergovich
