Summing up Art Week

From 18 to 24 November, exhibitions, panel discussions, presentations, tours and talks with curators and artists brought art, design and fashion aficionados to the Austrian capital for Vienna Art Week.

Initiated by the Dorotheum and hosted by Art Cluster Vienna, this festival focuses on the city’s vibrant creative scene, bringing visitors beyond the well-known locations, into the vast network of alternative exhibition spaces.

Curator Janina Falkner stated that this event is "not about its highlights", but rather an overview on the vibrant contemporary art scene in Vienna.

Roughly fifty locations all over Vienna present a multiplicity of exhibitions and projects, from well-known artists like Hermann Nitsch and Chris Burden, to the new and recently discovered talents such as Anna Witt. Most exhibitions will run through January (See Events, page 20).

This year’s motto, "Projecting Worlds" cites the role of the artist as a creator and narrator of his own universe, focusing on the dialogue between artist and viewer.

With this in mind, Vienna Art Week gives the visitor a chance to witness the creative process: around 100 renowned Viennese artists opened their studios on 23 November.

From the very tidy creative spaces to someone’s living room, you get a unique feel of what it is to work as an artist, while you smoke a cigarette or share a glass of wine.

In one of the studios, the artist’s daughter was doing acrobatics on a strip of cloth hanging from the ceiling.

In another atelier, we talked about a collection of the most peculiar objects: a globe, a piece of an animal’s skull, a model of an eye: in her words "extensions of herself." However, time constraints forced visitors to pick and choose.