Exhibition
not yet yours to imagine
with Henna-Riikka Halonen and Lila-Zoé Krauß
curated by Mirjami Schuppert and Pia Wamsler
Opening: Thursday, May 08, 2025, 7 pm
Duration: May 09 – June 28, 2025
Location: DAS WEISSE HAUS, second floor
Address: Hegelgasse 14, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Sound swirling up the staircase, seeping through the dividing walls, occupying the yard, bleeding into the urban space. Images shifting between perspectives, pulling visitors into a scene where time loops, identities blur, and the boundaries between dream and reality dissolve. In not yet yours to imagine, the Finnish artist Henna-Riikka Halonen and the German, Austria-based artist Lila-Zoé Krauß present Buoyant Force and Dream I: [Matrix].
In the world emerging in Henna-Riikka Halonen's Buoyant Force, technology seeps into everything, forming a porous, flooded environment. Audio work spread across the front garden and spiral staircase, combined with sculptural elements and digital paintings printed on fabric, creating a digital realm, dissolving the boundaries of reality, turning it into a space of liquidity. Within this shifting rhythm, images and sounds flow seamlessly between living bodies and technological devices, merging and transforming.
In Lila-Zoé Krauß' Dream I: [Matrix], visitors step into a fragmented reality, drifting between presence and illusion. A two-channel video installation unfolds in the room, dissolving the boundary between screen and space. The scene is part of the multimedia opera [After Her Destruction], in which the protagonist Girl uses a computer program to travel through her mind. In the fleeting encounter with two strangers, a conversation unfolds in a salon-like setting, reminiscent of a chamber play. The more they exchange, the less unclear it seems who is dreaming and who is being dreamed.
The works tell stories of worlds that might have been in the past, potentially exist in the present, or maybe are yet to come. These worlds created with the tools borrowed from speculative fiction are fragmented, layered and polyphonic. They are flooded with impressions and impulses, creating spaces where different temporalities – various presents, also those that have already passed and the ones to come in the future, may linger. Simultaneously, they are pregnant with potential, the potential that was never fulfilled, potential waiting for fulfilment, those without the prospect of it ever being achieved.
The fictive narratives of Henna-Riikka Halonen's and Lila-Zoé Krauß' works create spaces that invite to listen attentively, listen to the muted voices and stories they have to tell. These speculative spaces don’t accept linear, singular truths, but hint at concurrent narratives, or fragments of narratives, holding space for alternative ways of existing and subtly building sites of resistance.
The project is created in collaboration with the Finnland-Institut and is part of the pARTir initiative funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU.
Leadimage: Henna-Riikka Halonen, Buoyant Force; Lila-Zoé Krauß, Dream I: [Matrix], photomontage by Lila-Zoé Krauß
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