Felix Hoffmann is an image and cultural scholar and the inaugural Artistic Director of the Center for Photography and Lens-Based Media FOTO ARSENAL WIEN and the Director of FOTO WIEN.

From 2005 to 2022, he served as the Chief Curator of the exhibition space C/O Berlin, where he was responsible for exhibitions, programs, and strategy. He curated numerous international exhibitions, including Nan Goldin (2009), Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Lindbergh (2011), Gordon Parks (2014), Ren Hang and Elfie Semotan (2018), and William Eggleston (2023), as well as thematic exhibitions like Eerily Familiar: Images of Terror (2011), The Last Image: Photography and Death (2018), and Send me an Image: From Postcards to Social Media (2020). 

- Follow Felix on Instagram here --> https://www.instagram.com/felix_hoffmann__/

FOTO ARSENAL WIEN is Austria’s new center for photography and lens-based media. Since 2023 it has been responsible for the FOTO WIEN festival, and starting in 2025 it will be responsible for the Festival Vienna Digital Cultures with the Kunsthalle Wien.

Initiated as a media literacy center by the city of Vienna in fall 2022, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN explores all facets of photography. As a hub for photography and lens-based media in Austria, the institution brings together historical and international topics at the interface between analog and digital worlds as well as between static and moving pictures.

FOTO ARSENAL WIEN presents the full spectrum of the medium of photography in up to twelve exhibitions held annually in a one-thousand-square-meter exhibition space—a combination of young talents, still-to-be-discovered photographers, and internationally known artists.

- https://www.fotoarsenalwien.at/en/

FOTO WIEN is a member of the European Month of Photography (EMOP), a European collaborative project that currently includes photography festivals in Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, and Luxemburg.

Once an insider event for Vienna’s lively photography scene, FOTO WIEN has become Austria’s largest festival of photographic images in over twenty years of collective commitment. It offers programs for a broad audience that is interested in art and contemporary events as well as a professional audience.

FOTO ARSENAL WIEN has been the organizer since 2023.

- https://www.fotowien.at/en/

Michael Dooney

This episode of Subtext & Discourse Art World Podcast was recorded on 7. March 2025 between Perth (AU) and Vienna (AT).