<p>At the Venice Biennale, the Austrian pavilion reflects a move toward greater diversity</p>

Kathrin Heinrich

Queering it softly: How Vienna has awakened to gender discourse

<p>
	If this year’s Venice Biennale is any indication, art in Austria is diversifying:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/43569/Jakob-Lena-Knebl">Jakob Lena Knebl</a> and Ashley Hans Scheirl are turning the Austrian pavilion into one of their ‘spaces of desire’: a theatrical environment of vivid blues, greens, reds, and yellows that humorously connects installation, fashion, furniture, and even a new currency, to the queer-feminist artist duo’s sculptures and paintings. Titled ‘Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts’, the exhibition illustrates their hybridizing ‘transgenres and transmateriality’ that look at how desires construct identity.
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<p>
	While Knebl and Scheirl disapprove of reducing their media-expanding practice to its queerness, they are indisputable icons of the Austrian queer scene that they have helped to shape as artists, activists, and teachers. The two say that ‘gender discourse has entered mainstream society,’ but by Austrian standards their pavilion is still remarkable.
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<p>It was only in 2019 that a female artist was invited to mount a solo exhibition in the Austrian pavilion. Renate Bertlmann’s field of fragile yet menacing red glass knife-roses was juxtaposed with black-and-white images of her earlier works. In Vienna, the choice was seen as a long-overdue acknowledgment of a generation of female Austrian avant-garde artists that came onto the scene with the 1975 exhibition ‘Magna: Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität’, curated by the artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6992/VALIE-EXPORT">Valie Export</a> at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1229/Galerie-n%C3%A4chst-St-Stephan-Rosemarie-Schwarzw%C3%A4lder">Galerie nächst St. Stephan</a>.</p>

<p>Back then, the Austrian art world was very male, remembers Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, who became director of the gallery in 1978, and then owner in 1987. ‘After World War II, Viennese Actionism was crucial for artistic self-conception in a country that was extremely conservative. Actionists like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/15771/Hermann-Nitsch">Hermann Nitsch</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7901/G%C3%BCnter-Brus">Günter Brus</a> tested limits – but Export’s conceptual approach explicitly addressed women and sexuality,’ she says. Feminism was always intrinsic to Schwarzwälder as a gallerist, but working with artists like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7869/Katharina-Grosse">Katharina Grosse</a> and Karin Sander in the 1980s and 1990s increased&nbsp;her sensitivity to gender issues, which finds continuation in her collaboration with Sheila Hicks.&nbsp;The emergence of a new generation of internationally connected gallerists with female or queer programming, like Sophie Tappeiner,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2705/Croy-Nielsen">Croy Nielsen</a>, Gianni Manhattan, and Exile Gallery shows that gender has become a matter of course, says Schwarzwälder.</p>

<p>On paper, Vienna’s arts sector has reached gender parity on all levels in terms of staff numbers, surpassing national and international averages. The most established gallerists – including&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1180/Galerie-Krinzinger">Ursula Krinzinger</a> and Christine König, alongside Schwarzwälder – represent a kind of matriarchy. And nearly all the major museums in Vienna are headed by female directors, the most recent appointment being Lilli Hollein at the Museum of Applied Arts.</p>

<p>Art made in the city often reflects these conditions: gallerist Laura Windhager, who opened Gianni Manhattan in 2017, finds that ‘younger artists like Barbara Kapusta have evolved the body-centered feminist discourse of the 1970s towards genderqueer aspects.’ Using language, film, and sculpture, Kapusta’s installations address the notion of fluidity in the form of wobbly clay sculptures or detached speech bubbles: ‘I am longing for you to share your wetness,’ reads one. Other artists also riff on the body:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23544/Anna-Sophie-Berger">Anna-Sophie Berger</a>, who shows at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1112/Layr">Layr</a> gallery, makes, among other things, ethereal textile objects that zoom in on the friction of physical presence and absence.</p>

<p>But despite all this progress, Austria still lags behind in terms of diversity. According to Veronica Kaup-Hasler, Vienna’s Executive City Councillor for Cultural Affairs and Science, the often project-based working conditions chiefly disadvantage women. The former curator advocates for fair pay and diversity in leadership positions and across juries and selection committees – an instance of success being the appointment in 2019 of WHW, a collective of Croatian women, as directors of Kunsthalle Wien. Instead of attempting to meet various quotas, Kaup-Hasler focuses on creating ‘hybrid spaces’ to address new communities, like the Soho Studios in the 1930s housing complex Sandleitenhof, which host exhibitions and readings as well as neighborhood outreach events and art workshops for children.</p>

<p>This year’s pavilion in Venice is a signal to the local scene, according to the board of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ): ‘Knebl and Scheirl’s feminism is a radical shift from previous generations,’ agree the board members. Founded in 1910, VBKÖ lobbied for female artists when other Viennese artist associations like Secession forbade women from joining. Today, it has reinvented itself as a queer-feminist activist institution headed by a board of four women of color. ‘We try to collectively answer questions our artistic practices bring up, like how to deal with fragility regarding racial issues and queerness,’ they say. Careful to reflect its own history, the association examines what it means to be an Austrian institution today, aiming to include migrant stories into ‘Austrianness’; after all, 41% of the current Viennese population have a non-Austrian background.</p>

<p>Secession, one of the city’s oldest artist-run institutions, has turned into one of its most progressive exhibition venues. For the board, a feminist attitude is a given. ‘It’s even more important to stand up for human rights, anti-racism, and inclusivity,’ they say (speaking as a collective). They choose to focus programming on ‘artists whose experiential and biographical backgrounds are less represented.’ Some recent exhibitions dealt explicitly with gender questions, like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10902/Philipp-Timischl">Philipp Timischl</a>’s ‘Artworks for all Age Groups’ in 2018, which included a photographic series of the artist posing in drag.</p>

<p>But often works by queer artists aren’t legible as queer to museumgoers, says artist and cultural worker Florian Aschka, hinting at a larger issue: What constitutes queerness in artworks and institutional exhibition programs? Two years ago, he founded Queer Museum Vienna with Larissa Kopp, Thomas Trabitsch, and Berivan Sayici: an initiative advocating for a permanent space for representation and education. As authoritarian homophobic policies are on the rise in neighboring countries like Hungary and Poland, the need for a queer museum is ‘even more pressing in Vienna. Beyond needs for a cultural space, it’s politically important not to budge.’</p>

<p>In art and life, addressing feminism and gender diversity remains relevant, even urgent, in a country governed by the conservative ÖVP party for more than 30 years, and with the highest femicide rates in the EU. A small, ‘super-progressive bubble’ has been expanding in Vienna for years, particularly at the University of Applied Arts, where Knebl holds a professorship for Transmedia Art, and the Academy of Arts, where Scheirl just finished his_her tenure as professor of the class of Contextual Painting. The graduates’ work continues their teachers’ spirit of ‘transgenre’, like Sophie Utikal’s large hand-sewn textile works that render images of racialized bodies in scenes of protest and community in cotton-candy hues.</p>

<p>
	Collaborating with Belvedere Museum and Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien&nbsp;respectively, both the Queer Museum and VBKÖ are noticing a gradual shift in the city’s big institutions to catch up with grassroots initiatives. A new exhibition space run by contemporary art fund Phileas will add to the cultural landscape: set to open in May, its first exhibition extends Knebl and Scheirl’s Venice pavilion into the heart of Vienna’s scene by including their students in a group show. So, the Austrian Pavilion is taking steps toward institutional acknowledgment that must strike the balance between representation and tokenism. As VBKÖ puts it: ‘It’s a nod that something is bubbling under the surface.’
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<p>
	Kathrin Heinrich is an art historian and critic based in Vienna.</p><p>Verena Gotthardt is an photographer and writer based in Vienna.</p>

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