‘We will not be a traditional institution’: Foto Arsenal Wien takes up the mantle of Vienna’s radical art roots – The Art Newspaper

Foto Arsenal Wien, Austria’s first centre for photographic images and lens-based media, is due to open on 21 March in a new exhibition space in a 19th-century military complex, with Felix Hoffmann, the former director of C/O Berlin, as its artistic director.

The team behind the centre are the organisers of the Foto Wien photography biennial. Funded by the city government, Foto Arsenal Wien was conceived as a sister organisation to Kunsthalle Wien, a leading venue for contemporary art. It will present and explore contemporary photography from Austria and beyond in up to ten exhibitions a year.

“We will not be a traditional institution, but more of a hub, or a melting pot,” says Hoffmann, who has form for curatorial programming that broadens the concept of contemporary photography. Shows he oversaw at C/O Berlin included The Uncanny Familiar: Images of Terror (2011), The Last Image: Photography and Death (2019) and Send Me an Image: from Postcards to Social Media (2021), each of which made the ephemeral, archival or untraceable photograph its focus.

Groping

Last month, before opening its new exhibition space, Foto Arsenal staged an event with the provocative artist Valie Export, who is seen as belonging to an adjacent feminist strain of the Viennese Actionism movement. Hoffmann was also instrumental in bringing a retrospective of her work from Vienna’s Albertina to Berlin last year. Among her best-known works is Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), executed on the streets of Munich in 1968. She invited passers-by to place their hands for 12 seconds into a curtained box that surrounded her breasts. As they groped, they were required to look into her eyes. She received threatening letters and phone calls as a result of this performance work.

But Vienna, Hoffmann points out, has been a hotbed of radical art for centuries, dating back to the Belle Epoque and long before. That legacy continues to the present day, he says. “There are so many interesting impulses happening in the city, but they are not transported out of the country, and so they are sometimes not very visible on the international stage,” he says.

Show #1

Foto Arsenal’s inaugural show, Magnum: A World of Photography, appears to be a little more conservative and explores the creation, distribution and archiving of now famous images from members of the Magnum photo agency. Hoffmann says the show will focus objectively on “the varied and often confidential working processes” of the documentary photographers who brought far-off news to kitchen tables while reinventing the lexicon of photographic inquiry.

Hoffmann is committed to making Foto Arsenal relevant to a generation for whom Magnum Photos may as well be the Renaissance. “This means fostering media literacy beyond exhibitions,” he says. The second half of the institution will be dedicated to interactive educational strategies, particularly for younger generations, including performances, panels and workshops to explore how “collective image culture” will impact our lives in a holistic way.

“Typically, only a few privileged groups of children will be able to come to a place like ours,” Hoffmann says. “It is important that we create an outreach programme for underprivileged groups of people so we can navigate with them the question: how does our image world relate to society in the 21st century? Because when you go on social media, it poses so many big questions of us.”