Habitat – The Exhibition of the Nominees for the Ö1 Talent Scholarship 2023
With the support of the WIENER STÄDTISCHE VERSICHERUNGSVEREIN, the Ö1 Talent Scholarship is awarded annually to a young talent from an Austrian art university. This year, for the fourth time, the works of the nominated artists, selected by a jury of nine experts and the audience of the radio station Ö1 via online voting, are presented at the Leopold Museum (10.11.2023 – 14.01.2024).
Climate change, migration flows and wars are more present than ever after the pandemic. The accelerated dynamics of ecological, political and social upheavals reveal the fault lines of a present in which individual and collective environments are challenged in manifold ways. The associated questions are just as diverse as the conceptual and aesthetic approaches of the artistic positions represented in the exhibition:
Luise Müller's documentaries Nördlich von Libyen (North of Libya, 2023) and Staub (Dust, 2017) are precise and careful analyses of seemingly contradictory realities of life and their underlying structures of power and violence. She is studying at the studio for Art and Time | Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her artistic work, which focuses on narrative documentary film, Müller is particularly interested in the irresolvable and ambivalent. In 2023, she celebrated the premiere of her first feature-length documentary "North of Libya" at the Documentary Film Week in Hamburg. Müller describes herself as always on the lookout and appreciates the wide scope for experimentation in narrative film.
Veronika Harb opens up existing architectures for differentiated perceptual experiences at the intersections of physical and social spaces through her biomorphic-looking tension meshes.
Alisa Omelianceva reflects in her sculptures and installations made of transparent and mirroring surfaces on the fragility, delimitation and extensibility of the human body in the context of social progress and developments in medical technology.
Laura Roth’s photographic series Great Expectations (2022/23) questions the limits of tourist appropriation and the reconstructability of places of longing at the transition between reality and fiction, alienation from nature and its romanticization.
Carlos Vergara deciphers in his installations and photographs individual and collective images of home and exoticism along stereotypical, colonially shaped perspectives on the "paradise backdrops" of his Colombian homeland.