KUNSTHALLE EXNERGASSE

building < against refers to the non-conformist production of space, resistant buildings, protest architectures, autonomous and functionally open architectures, the preservation and cultivation of places, radical reconstructions. And even more radical practices of not building at all.

We are pleased to invite you to the open studio of Natalia Matsenko and Yuri Yefanov! The curator and artist are part of our artist and research residency program from September to October 2025. Under the title City Visions 2050 – Between Reality and Utopia, they invite you to join them for an exchange.

What’s the weight of a ton when distributed amongst peers, handled and moved around with archaic DIY instruments? With Moving Mass we aim to bridge the concepts of The Right to the City, Commons, and Action-based research. We’ll be looking at Mass both as an assembly of people and as the physical opposite of a void. Gravity, leverage, torque; using bodies and mass as means of transgression. Aiming to achieve what’s seemingly impossible we won’t necessarily be.

At the end of the exhibition building < against, there will be a festive exit. With our self-built protest structure, flags, and trumpets, we will march to St. Marx. A procession through Vienna, a parade for more autonomous free spaces. We hand over our structure and warm ourselves by the fire in St. Marx. Feel free to come in costume, as a clown, Pulcinella, or juggler, etc. We will go in any weather.

Natalia Matsenko is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer. She focuses on the landscape and environmental transformations, human and nonhuman communities as well as networks, new media, and cultural heritage preservation. Yuri Yefanov is a Ukrainian artist and filmmaker whose work explores the otherworldly digital dimensions of computer-generated imagery.

The exhibition project Botanizing the Asphalt explores the political role of light in urban spaces at night. Examining the materiality of night and its sensorial, normative, and atmospheric aspects, the potential of the nocturnal as a community meeting space unfolds against the backdrop of pressing social, ecological, and political contexts.