Regular Wednesday #1

Start permanent temporär

Space as a question, space as a resource, transformation of institutions, Host: Francis Ruyter
With Daniela Hahn, Mel E. Logan, Frederik Marroquin, Peter Sit

“It is evident that there is a lack of cultural spaces, which promote an everyday culture as a life practice and investigate social models that support community-oriented conduct. In an open cultural and workshops house the association sees the opportunity to widely remedy this deficiency and to create in the TGM such a social model.” Excerpt from about the intentions behind WUK’s foundation – Helmut Fielhauser, Walter Hnat, Christine Leinfellner, 1980

The founding of the WUK, the home of the kex—kunsthalle exnergasse, grew out of a broader counter-cultural movement, in Vienna and in a broader European context. Years later, we can speak of very different conditions, but also of how the legacy of these movements has been internalised and even institutionalised across many structures within the cultural field. In this, permanent temporär could describe an embedding of precariousness rather than something that secures conditions for risk-taking and free-thinking, artistic, social, or otherwise. With the emerging support mechanisms, such as “Leerstandsaktivierung” (vacancy activation), concepts for Vienna “Kulturankerzentren” (local cultural hubs), and the re-use of problematic historical structures, comes an opportunity to reconsider the 8 Point Program of the founders of the WUK against the backdrop of the city that has grown up around it, with a view of the ever increasing possibilities of international exchange within these networks once seen as only locally relevant.

WELCOME TO PUPPENMUTTI’S SELF-SERVICE BAR by Hilma Bäckström

DIVE INTO PUPPENMUTTI’S WORLD OF SMALL PLEASURES

PUPPENMUTTI’S SELBSTBEDIENUNGSBAR SERVES A VARIETY OF TREATS: CHOCOLATES, CAKES, LIQUIDS, AND SNACKS OF ALL FORMS

AT THE BAR COUNTER, YOU WILL FIND “THE BOOK OF INSTRUCTIONS”

HELP YOURSELF TO THE DIFFERENT TREATS OF THE DAY AND LET “THE BOOK OF INSTRUCTIONS” GUIDE YOU STEP BY STEP ON HOW TO MIX TONIGHT’S COCKTAILS

POUR, TASTE, COMBINE, REPEAT

Cement Shoes by Julian Siffert and Seth Weiner

Cement Shoes is a spatial intervention and staging by Julian Siffert and Seth Weiner that treats institutional memory as something to be built upon rather than preserved. Approaching nostalgia as a material with weight, the project uses humour, play, and process-based strategies to consider how a place can be inhabited without becoming stuck in its past. Visitors and participants are invited to move through and activate a kit of parts drawn from kex— or imported from surrounding households. Posters, welcome mats, walls marked by years of use, plinths, shelves, socks, and circulation elements form a sequence of situations. Some gestures shift through events and use while others linger. Permanently temporary, the work serves as container and stage, politely disturbing both the near and distant future.

The collective experiment permanent temporär evolves out of a series of invitations and events with different formats – the Regular Wednesdays – which then culminate in an exhibition whose opening will only take place at the end of the process.

The four thematic fields include space and resources, voids or the (seemingly) absent, programming and participation strategies, and the contradictions between the permanently new and ever-temporary. The project departs from artists’ biographies and the transformations of cultural institutions and concepts of art in recent decades in Vienna and beyond.

Artists and curators Peter Kozek, Munira Mohamud, Francis Ruyter, and Johanna Tinzl were invited to develop and host events, discussion rounds, or other formats as Regular Wednesdays to constitute the exhibition framework.