Visiting Critics Vienna: An Outside Perspective on Art in Austria Event

What are highlights of Curated by and the Steirische Herbst 2023? What are current trends and specificities of art in Vienna and Graz? How does state funding influence the art that is produced? What is the role of the art writer and critic today?, are some of the questions we will address during the final public event of Visiting Critics Vienna. Time to reflect and to give back for the critics who participated in Verein K’s residency program and to answer questions of the public.

What is Visiting Critics Vienna?

An intense 10-day program each September for four international art critics, where the participants visit artist studios, meet theorists, curators and other actors of the Austrian art scene, discover institutions, galleries and the exhibitions at Curated By in Vienna as well as the Steirischer Herbst in Graz. Each residency ends with a group discussion about the participants’ perception of art in Austria and an open exchange of ideas about art writing and criticism with the public, “an outside perspective on art in Austria.”

Participants:

Xenia Benivolski (Canada) curates, writes and lectures about sound, music and visual art. Since 2021 she is the editor of You Can’t Trust Music at e-flux, a multi-form research project connecting sound-based artists, musicians and writers to explore together the way that landscape, acoustics and musical thought contribute to the formation of social and political structures. In Toronto, she was co-director and curator at SUGAR between 2017 and 2020. Xenia contributes to the Worker as Futurist project at Lakehead University’s sociology department. She also teaches art criticism at OCAD University.

Carlos Kong (USA) is a writer and art historian living in Berlin. He is the co-founder and editor of The Public Review, a new publication for long-form art criticism. He is a joint-PhD candidate in Art History at Princeton University and in Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where he is completing a dissertation on Turkish German migration histories in contemporary art and film.

Erëmirë Krasniqi (Kosovo) is an art writer, curator and researcher based in Prishtina. As an independent curator, she has led and curated projects for the National Gallery of Kosovo, National Gallery of Arts in Albania, 39th EVA International, Ireland and Manifesta14, Prishtina, Kosovo. Her research practice is at the intersection of contemporary art, digital humanities and cultural heritage. Since 2017, Erëmirë is the executive director of Oral History Kosovo, an open-access digital resource which engages new forms of cultural production, supporting and advocating the essential work of media archives.

Khanya Mashabela (South Africa) is a curator at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town. She has curated numerous exhibitions including the largest iteration of Kudzanai Chiurai’s Library of Things We Forgot to Remember (Palais de Tokyo, Paris), and And then you see yourself: Zanele Muholi (Norval Foundation, Cape Town). She held the role of Galleries and Special Projects Manager at Cape Town Art Fair between 2017 and 2019, as well as nine years as an independent art writer with a focus on the aesthetic and political concerns of modern and contemporary artists from southern Africa.

Moderator:
Klaus Speidel, art and image theorist, philosopher, art critic and curator.