RECENT:
9 – 21 AUGUST 2025
ZEICHENSÄTZE & SPRACHRÄUME (SETS OF SIGNS & SPACES OF LANGUAGE)
Exhibition at Galerie Petra Seiser, Schörfling, Lake Attersee, Austria. Inspired by Günter Brus’s Bild-Dichtung — a poetic fusion of language and image — this group exhibition brings together works by Günter Brus, Nikolaus Gansterer, Anya Belyat-Giunta, Erich Gruber, Zenita Komad, and Dominik Steiger. From Brus’s William Blake-inspired picture-poems to Komad’s text-infused collages and Belyat-Giunta’s dreamlike bodies, the show explores drawing as a space where thought, language, and image meet. Nikolaus Gansterer’s work continues this tradition by diagramming the transitions between what can be said, what can be shown, and what can be drawn. Deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, he develops a personal visual grammar—one without fixed rules, constantly rewriting itself and shaped by the dialectic of ambiguity—to articulate the subtle processes of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. In his drawings, thought becomes visible as it unfolds, embracing ambiguity as a resource and inviting viewers into an active process of sense-making.
3 JUNE 2025, 19:30
OPEN CIRCLES – A CONVERSATION ABOUT ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND SUSTAINABILITY
How can art and research work together to open up new perspectives on sustainability? In this live dialogue at MQ Summer Stage, Main Courtyard, Vienna we will explore the question of what constitutes artistic research: Who shapes it? What does it need? What topics does it address? And how can it influence our perception? Especially with regard to ecological challenges, art opens up new ways of thinking and feeling. It also helps us to develop a sensitivity for the non-human – for plants, animals or other life forms. Current threats not only lead to an environmental crisis, but also to a crisis of perception: the emotional connection to nature is weakening.
The artistic researchers Ruth Anderwald and Leonhard Grond, Ernst Logar, Jeanette Müller and Paul Divjak as well as Christoph Weber present their perspectives in this dialogue. Together with members of the Shaken Grounds research project, they will provide insights into their methods – from sounds and words to objects, scents and performative interventions.
At the end, we invite you to a film screening of ‘Shaken Grounds, Shifting Skies’. The film by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Victor Jaschke, Peter Kozek, Werner Moebius und Lucie Strecker in cooperation with Arno Böhler, Nicolas Freytag, und Sylvia Scheidl impressively shows how our environment resonates in our bodies and documents art-based seismographic research. Moderation: Alexander Damianisch, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Open Circles is an event organised in cooperation with the Support Art and Research of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, free entry.
9 May 2025, 9:30
PRESENTATION & BOOK LAUNCH: CONTINGENT AGENCIES – INQUIRING INTO THE EMERGENCE OF ATMOSPHERES at SAR CONFERENCE in PORTO on RESONANCE
How do atmospheres—those subtle, fleeting affective presences that co-shape our perception of the world—come into being? What forces enable and constrain their appearance? How to research these complex processes in a non-reductive way? Maybe by entering in a state of resonance?
Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga presentation at the 16th International Conference on Artistic Research at the University of Porto, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal of the artistic research project Contingent Agencies. This inquiry explores the dynamic relationship between human and non-human agencies as enabling conditions for the emergence of atmospheres. This cross-disciplinary investigation is conducted through multimodal practices of notation, reflection, showing, and sharing realized in diverse media within different theoretical frameworks such as phenomenology, enactivism, and new materialism. The present book published by Hatje Cantz Berlin, complemented by an extensive online archive, features multiple research artifacts – including texts, drawings, photo series, diagrams, sound recordings, and video stills – as an invitation for a wider community to join the inquiry into more than human agencies. A group of internationally renowned authors explores the emergence of atmospheres through diverse perspectives, including art, artistic research, western and non-western philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and quantum physics. With contributions by Alex Arteaga, Karen Barad, Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Gerhard Dirmoser, Debris Facility, Mika Elo, Nikolaus Gansterer, Rosie Isaac, Sabina Holzer, Tim Ingold, Paula Kramer, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Hans-Joerg Rheinberger, Leena Rouhiainen, Andreas Spiegl. Edited by Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer.
7 April 2025, 18:30
BOOK LAUNCH: CONTINGENT AGENCIES – INQUIRING INTO THE EMERGENCE OF ATMOSPHERES
Nikolaus Gansterer, Alex Arteaga in conversation with invited authors Arno Boehler, Alexander Damianisch, Gerhard Dirmoser, Sabina Holzer, Andreas Spiegl at the University of Applied Arts Vienna,
at the APL Angewandte Performance Laboratory, Expositur Georg-Coch-Platz (former PostSparKasse), mezzanine floor, Georg‐Coch‐Platz 2, 1010 Vienna, Austria. Contingent Agencies, an artistic research project initiated by Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer, explores the dynamic relationship between human and non-human agencies as enabling conditions for the emergence of atmospheres. This cross-disciplinary investigation is conducted through multimodal practices of notation, reflection, showing, and sharing realized in diverse media within different theoretical frameworks such as phenomenology, enactivism, and new materialism. The present book published by Hatje Cantz Berlin, complemented by an extensive online archive, features multiple research artifacts – including texts, drawings, photo series, diagrams, sound recordings, and video stills – as an invitation for a wider community to join the inquiry into more than human agencies. A group of internationally renowned authors explores the emergence of atmospheres through diverse perspectives, including art, artistic research, western and non-western philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and quantum physics. With contributions by Alex Arteaga, Karen Barad, Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Gerhard Dirmoser, Debris Facility, Mika Elo, Nikolaus Gansterer, Rosie Isaac, Sabina Holzer, Tim Ingold, Paula Kramer, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Hans-Joerg Rheinberger, Leena Rouhiainen, Andreas Spiegl. Edited by Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer.