Secession Podcast

In dieser Folge spricht der Künstler und Filmemacher Josef Dabernig mit Kuratorin und Kunsthistorikerin Fanny Hauser über seine künstlerischen Anfänge in der Zeichnung und Kleinplastik, das Verhältnis von Film, Skulptur, Fotografie und Text in seinem Werk sowie über seine langjährige Beziehung zur Secession, wo er mehrmals ausgestellt hat, als Vorstandsmitglied tätig war und wo er nach dem Studium im Rahmen eines Akademikertrainings Mitte der 1980er-Jahre die frische, internationale Ausrichtung der Institution unmittelbar miterlebte.

Das Gespräch wurde am 12. Dezember 2025 in der Secession aufgenommen.

Josef Dabernig, geb. 1956 in Lienz. Studium der Bildhauerei an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Filme seit 1994, lebt in Wien.

Beteiligungen an der der Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana (2000), 49. und 50. Venedig Biennale (2001, 2003), 6. Gyumri Biennale (2008), 9. Gwangju Biennale (2012), 1. Bergen Assembly (2013), 6. Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2013), Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg (2014), steirischer herbst ’20 und ’22 sowie der 15. Baltic Triennial, Vilnius (2024).

Festivalteilnahmen u.a. an Locarno International Film Festival, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Toronto International Film Festival und Internationale Filmfestspiele Venedig.

Fanny Hauser ist Kuratorin und Direktorin der Kunsthalle Zürich. Zuvor war sie als stellvertretende Direktorin am Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst in Aachen tätig. 2015 gründete sie gemeinsam mit Carolina Nöbauer, Denise Helene Sumi und Franziska Sophie Wildförster den in Wien ansässigen Kunstverein Kevin Space, wo sie zahlreiche Einzelausstellungen und künstlerische Neuproduktionen mitverantwortete. Bevor sie von 2019 bis 2021 gemeinsam mit Viktor Neumann kuratorische Stipendiatin der Gebert Stiftung für Kultur in Rapperswil war, arbeitete sie als kuratorische Assistentin für die documenta 14 in Athen und Kassel. Sie studierte Kunstgeschichte und Komparatistik in Wien und Paris und war bis 2022 Lehrbeauftragte an der Universität für angewandte Kunst in Wien.

Secession Podcast: Members ist eine Gesprächsreihe mit Mitgliedern der Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye mit einem Ausschnitt aus Combat of dreams für Streichquartett und Zuspielung

Shortly before the opening on 28 November 2026, Cevdet Erek talks with curator Bettina Spörr about his exhibition and sound installation on Secession's façade.

Cevdet Erek

Some of Cevdet Erek’s site-specific installations and sonic environments, placed at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and architecture, evolve around the idea of ‘sound ornamentation’. With this term, the artist refers to Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime (1908) amongst others. This text celebrates lack of ornamentation as the mark of a ‘cultivated’ society. Loos’ polemic is key to a moralising discourse that once sought to purge architecture of decoration in the name of progress. In that context, ornament – associated with sensuality, femininity, and excess – was condemned as wasteful and irrational. Loos’ text linked ornament to primitivism and degeneration, framing modern Western culture as superior to the supposedly ‘undeveloped’. Such rhetoric not only marginalised the close relationship between ornament and abstraction but also exposed the colonial and patriarchal logics underpinning modernist aesthetics.

Erek re-enters this ideological terrain, transforming ornamentation from decorative surface into temporal, vibratory structure – one that organises space and perception. In his installations sound is not background but architecture itself – something built, inhabited, and experienced by bodies in motion. Here, ornamentation becomes a verb: it describes the act of tuning, of aligning oneself with surrounding frequencies. Through attention, the visitor becomes part of the composition. In this way, Erek’s installations dissolve the boundaries between composer and listener, architecture and inhabitant. More

Cevdet Erek was born in Istanbul in 1974, where he lives and works. He has developed site-specific installations and presented his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions, among others at Museumsquartier, Vienna; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Art Institute of Chicago; M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte

Since 2008, Bettina Spörr is a curator at the Secession, where she engages in close collaboration with artists to conceptualise and realise exhibitions that explore the profound impact of contemporary art on society. Throughout her career, she has worked with numerous artists on solo exhibitions and, in 2010, curated the group show where do we go from here? at the Secession.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Departing from Duane Linklater’s exhibition mâcistan at Secession, on view through 15 February 2026, Julienne Lorz, Professor for Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and curator Haris Giannouras talk about the history and present of, and forms that have shaped institutional critique since the 1960s as well as the ways in which Linklater explores a new way of instituting.

Julienne Lorz is Professor for Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since October 2021, the new Master’s programme Expanded Museum Studies has been dedicated to examining, expanding and reorienting the concept of museum in all its facets. Previously she was Chief Curator at Gropius Bau in Berlin and a curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich, having curated and co-curated several international projects, monographic, and thematic group exhibitions including artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Joan Jonas, Laure Prouvost, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Haegue Yang.

Haris Giannouras works with artists to make exhibitions, artworks, publications and events. He is currently a curator at the Secession in Vienna. Before that he worked at MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt am Main and Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. Recent projects include work with Studio for Propositional Cinema, Cana Bilir-Meier, Atelier Bow-Wow, Andrea Büttner, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson, Onyeka Igwe, Hiwa K, Ghislaine Leung, Duane Linklater, Karī Mugo, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, and the Estate of Suzan Pitt.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed

Duane Linklater Supplies for the Soul

During the opening of Duane Linklater’s exhibition mâcistan on 28 November 2025, the performance Supplies for the Soul was acted out by three performers. Listen and enjoy the recording of this unique event.

Duane Linklater’s work and practice is grounded on an inspective inquiry on the foundations of institutions as they relate to the contemporary life and histories of Indigenous Peoples. His installations often employ paintings, sculptures, readymade objects, personal belongings, printed matter, images and symbols that he collects and accumulates. This process, linked to the concept of the cache – an enclosement, a safekeep – builds the core for a new body of work the artist presents in his exhibition at Secession.

During the opening a live act unfolded. Performed by a singer, a guitarist and a drum set, the new score, or musical soundtrack, titled Supplies for the Soul echoes sonic memories tethered to the multifarious histories of community and powerful tenderness of reclaiming agency, art and institutions.

Performers: Lili Ojeda, Matevž Počič, and Baj Gostič

An event organised by the Secession Friends

Duane Linklater (born 1976) is Omaskêko Ininiwak from the Moose Cree First Nation. He lives and works in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. Linklater was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It's Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2018, Linklater installed pêyakotênaw—a public artwork comprising three large teepee sculptures—along the High Line in New York. He was the 2016 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Media Art, and the 2013 Sobey Art Award winner. In 2017, Linklater was awarded a public commission for the Don River Valley Park, Toronto in 2017.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Duane Linklater Supplies for the Soul

During the opening of Duane Linklater’s exhibition mâcistan on 28 November 2025, the performance Supplies for the Soul was acted out by three performers. Listen and enjoy the recording of this unique event.

Duane Linklater’s work and practice is grounded on an inspective inquiry on the foundations of institutions as they relate to the contemporary life and histories of Indigenous Peoples. His installations often employ paintings, sculptures, readymade objects, personal belongings, printed matter, images and symbols that he collects and accumulates. This process, linked to the concept of the cache – an enclosement, a safekeep – builds the core for a new body of work the artist presents in his exhibition at Secession.

During the opening a live act unfolded. Performed by a singer, a guitarist and a drum set, the new score, or musical soundtrack, titled Supplies for the Soul echoes sonic memories tethered to the multifarious histories of community and powerful tenderness of reclaiming agency, art and institutions.

Performers: Lili Ojeda, Matevž Počič, and Baj Gostič

An event organised by the Secession Friends

Duane Linklater (born 1976) is Omaskêko Ininiwak from the Moose Cree First Nation. He lives and works in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. Linklater was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It's Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2018, Linklater installed pêyakotênaw—a public artwork comprising three large teepee sculptures—along the High Line in New York. He was the 2016 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Media Art, and the 2013 Sobey Art Award winner. In 2017, Linklater was awarded a public commission for the Don River Valley Park, Toronto in 2017.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

What can we truly know about ourselves and our histories in an age of hypervisibility, when algorithms and social structures alike decide not only what is seen but what is pushed into invisibility or irrelevance?

On the afternoon of 28 November 2025, Mimi Ọnụọha talked about her exhibition Soft Zeros; what she learned about collecting data and organizing it, about the Convict Leasing system and the impact is has had especially on Black lives in the USA, and about collective forgetting and denial over a 2-year research stretch and in the process of creating the new body of work that is presented in the exhibition.

Mimi Ọnụọha

In Soft Zeros, Mimi Ọnụọha examines the unreliability of archives and the instability of knowledge, exploring how absence and silence – shaped by algorithmic bias, historical denial, and collective forgetting – become meaningful. She points to what has not been collected, asked, allowed, or represented. More

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha’s work questions and exposes the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the seeming absences that define systems of labor, ecology and relations.

Ọnụọha’s work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art (NY, USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (CN), La Gaitê Lyrique (FR), Gropius Bau (DE), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and Atlanta Contemporary (GA, USA), among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by the Academy of Arts, Berlin (DE), the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (NY, USA), and Princeton University (NJ, USA). Her work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK). Ọnụọha is a Creative Capital and Fulbright–National Geographic grantee. She is also the co-founder of A People’s Guide to Tech, an artist-led organization that makes educational guides and workshops about emerging technology.

Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Vienna Secession since 2007. She is a regular lecturer in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and since 2023, a jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed

Nach einem gemeinsamen Besuch der Ausstellung „In & Out of Painting*“ im Belvedere 21 unterhalten sich Ashley Hans Scheirl und AntkeAntek Engel, Leiter*in des Instituts für Queer Theory in Berlin, unter anderem über Zusammenarbeit, Community, Queering- und Genderfragen, Verletzlichkeit, Bewegung und Wahrnehmung und über Archive. Viel Spaß beim Hören der neuen Folge.

Diese Folge wurde am 17. November 2025 in der Secession aufgenommen.

Ashley Hans Scheirl *1956 in Salzburg, lebt in Wien. Studium an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (Diplom 1980). Zwischen 1979 und 1998 entstanden über 50 Super8 Kurzfilme und zwei Langfilme. 1981–82 Aufenthalt in New York, von 1987 bis 2005 lebte Scheirl in London. 2003

AntkeAntek Engel (xi/xens; they/them) leitet das Institut für Queer Theory (iQt) in Berlin, das seit 2006 Projekte initiiert, in denen sich akademische und aktivistische, philosophische, politische und künstlerische Praxen verflechten. Engel hat 2001 an der Universität Potsdam in Philosophie promoviert und ist seitdem auf Gastprofessuren für Gender und Queer Studies sowie freiberuflich in Wissenschaft und Kulturproduktion tätig. Xi hat zahlreichen Bücher und Aufsätze zu queeren und feministischen Themen, zu politischer Philosophie, poststrukturalistischer Repräsentationskritik und queering visuelle Kultur veröffentlicht. 

Secession Podcast: Members ist eine Gesprächsreihe mit Mitgliedern der Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye mit einem Ausschnitt aus Combat of dreams für Streichquartett und Zuspielung

Hören Sie in dieser Folge den Architekten, Ausstellungskurator, Architekturhistoriker, kritischen Beobachter und Kommentator seiner gebauten Umgebung Otto Kapfinger im Gespräch mit der Architektin Claudia Cavallar. Kapfinger ist seit Mitte der 1970er-Jahre Secessions-Mitglied und hat Mitte der 1980er-Jahre mit Adolf Krischanitz und Oskar Putz die umfassende Sanierung des Hauses verantwortet. In diesem lebendigen Gespräch teilt Kapfinger sein geradezu lexikalisches Wissen über Architektur, Stadtplanung, bildende Kunst, Fotografie und Kulturpolitik, nicht nur im historischen Wien um die Jahrhundertwende, sondern auch aus der Perspektive eines aktiven Gestalters.

Diese Folge wurde am 17. Oktober 2025 in der Secession aufgenommen.

Otto Kapfinger (*1949) lebt als freier Architekturwissenschaftler in Wien. Er ist Autor von etwa 50 Büchern zur Baukunst in Österreich und Kurator zahlreicher Ausstellungen. 1970 gründete er mit Angela Hareiter und Adolf Krischanitz die Experimental-Architekt*innengruppe Missing Link, die bis zu ihrer Auflösung 1980 künstlerische Aktionen, Performances und Experimentalfilme realisierte. 1985/86 unternahm er im Rahmen der Sanierung der Secession von Adolf Krischanitz umfassende architekturhistorische Recherchen für die Renovierung des Olbrich-Baus. Von 1978 bis 1992 war Kapfinger im Vorstand der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Architektur und von 1980 bis 84 im Vorstand der Secession Wien. 1981 bis 1991 schrieb er regelmäßig Rezensionen und Essays für die Tageszeitung Die Presse. 2019 wurde ihm der Ehrendoktor der Technischen Universität Wien verliehen. Zuletzt leitete er das Forschungsprojekt Anatomie einer Metropole. Bauen mit Eisenbeton in Wien 1890–1918 (Ausstellung im Wien Museum 2025).

Claudia Cavallar studierte Architektur bei Hans Hollein und Greg Lynn. Nach Mitarbeit in verschiedenen Architekturbüros, unter anderem bei the next ENTERprise, ist sie seit 2010 selbstständig. In ihrer Arbeit setzt sie sich mit dem Unauffälligen, Zufälligen und Gewohnten in der Architektur auseinander, mit dem Verhältnis zwischen Tradition und Erfindung, Ortsspezifischem und Allgemeinem und dem Einfluss, den Produktionsmethoden der Architektur auf das Ergebnis haben. Seit 2008 beschäftigt sie sich mit der Arbeit von Josef Frank, insbesondere seiner Innenräume, Stoffmuster und Möbel. Sie ist außerdem für Gestaltung und Display sowie als Kuratorin von Ausstellungen tätig. 2025 wurde Claudia Cavallar mit dem Hans Hollein Kunstpreis für Architektur ausgezeichnet. www.claudiacavallar.at

June Crespo’s sculptural assemblages, which the artist understands as communicating vessels, resonate within our bodies. At times delicate, at others forceful, they always emanate a vital, living quality. Listen to the artist talk about her inspirations and working process.

June Crespo

Most of the works in the exhibition Danzante take their formal vocabulary from the iris and the strelitzia (bird of paradise). Yet the artist is not concerned with representing these plants. Instead of proposing a classificatory symbolic order, they serve as starting points for a deeper engagement with materiality and the evocative potential of surfaces and textures, which take precedence over the pictorial dimension. Crespo treats her materials as agents, understanding herself an assistant to her work rather than an authority figure. In this way, she offers us a visceral experience – an encounter with objects that touch us in our corporeality and heighten our awareness of our own presence and its fragmented condition. More

June Crespo (Pamplona1982) lives and works in Bilbao. Obtained her BFA from the Basque Country university (Bilbao) in 2005 and completed a two years residency at De Ateliers (Amsterdam) in 2017. Her solo shows include: Solar (2025), at Ehrhardt Flórez gallery, Madrid. Their weft, the grass (2024) at 1646.nl, The Hague; Vascular (2024) at Guggenheim Bilbao Museum; they saw their house turn into fields (2023) at CA2M, Madrid; Acts of Pulse (2022) at P420, Bologna; entre alguien y algo (2022) at CarrerasMugica, Bilbao; Am I an Object (2021) PA///KT (Amsterdam); Helmets (2020) Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Recently her work has also been shown in group such as: L´écorce (2023) at CRAC-Alsace; The Milk of Dreams (2022) at Venice Biennale; Fata Morgana (2022) Jeu de Paume (Paris) and The point of Sculpture (2021) at Fundación Miró (Barcelona).

Since 2008, Bettina Spörr is a curator at the Secession, where she engages in close collaboration with artists to conceptualise and realise exhibitions that explore the profound impact of contemporary art on society. Throughout her career, she has worked with numerous artists on solo exhibitions and, in 2010, curated the group show where do we go from here? at the Secession.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Listen to John Smith talk about his most ordinary name and how that possibly has more impact on his work than you’d think; how this inspired him to make the (autofictional) film Being John Smith (2024), one of three films in his Secession show; about the power of language, used both as voice-over and caption, over imagery; and about bad puns.

This episode was recorded on 11 September 2025, shortly before the opening of John’s exhibition:

John Smith

In the mid-1970s, John Smith shared the widespread interest in challenging the illusionism of mainstream cinema and subverting apparent divisions between abstraction and representation, between the personal and the political. He did so alongside colleagues from the Royal College of Art, where he trained, and members of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative. From the beginning, he was also fascinated by the capacity of sound – especially of the spoken word – to shape perception or conjure images. Smith handles image, sound, and text flexibly: instead of synchronizing them, he works with interruptions and disruptions – and a lot of black screen in between. He explains: ‘I’m not afraid of having darkness in films because that’s where the imagination works. I really love sound and darkness.’ More

Since 1972, John Smith has made over sixty film, video and installation works that have been shown in museums, art galleries and independent cinemas around the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals. Retrospectives of his films have been presented at film festivals in sixteen countries. He received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011, and in 2013 he was the winner of the UK’s Jarman Award. www.johnsmithfilms.com  

Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Vienna Secession since 2007. She is a regular lecturer in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and since 2023, a jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.