Kunsthalle Exnergasse Archive

The exhibition Botanizing the Asphalt explores the political role of urban spaces at night through three thematic realms that intersect with the nocturnal: protest, energy, and the botanizing.

“Beneath the Surface: Deep Listening, Buried Narratives, and Embodied Resistance” is a lecture performance by Luïza Luz, based on their book of the same title (2024, Archive Books & we make it). Combining spoken words and somatics, it introduces deep listening as an embodied political practice. Participants are invited to sense how power and emotion take shape in the body, where listening becomes a practice of awareness, refusal, and collective attunement.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Wharf, the “construction site by the water,” is a place for building, learning, reading, planning, and resting. Over six construction days, we will work with you to build a vehicle for protest, which we will ceremoniously drive out at the end of the exhibition. No skills, more thrills.

In the workshop, we will first show a few fun “building materials” from the shelf, talk about protesting, and then work with clay, water, and wool ourselves in protest. This will take place in the shipyard. We want to pay special attention to the use of raw wool for all possible and impossible purposes in construction. The end result: wool paving stones, felt tiles, or even your own little “Wollbau” (cf. Folke Köbberling).