Context

Abaseh Mirvali
Artistic Director, viennacontemporary 

Video

The inspiring conversation between Abaseh Mirvali, director of Vienna Contemporary, and Sandro Droschl ranged from Diego Bianchi’s current exhibition ​“Errores Irreales” at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark to Mirvali’s comprehensive expertise on Diego Bianchi, which is based on many years of close and intensive collaboration with the artist. In addition, the work of Celina Eceiza was discussed and placed in the broader context of Argentine art history. Another focus was on Mirvali’s remarkable professional career — from her beginnings in San Francisco to the Colleción/​Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, the Biennial of the Americas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, to her current position at viennacontemporary, where she was responsible for the program of the 2025 fair. This year’s edition brought together 97 galleries and five institutions from 23 countries. Thanks to Mirvali’s commitment, her professional expertise, and her consistent focus on innovative approaches to mediation, viennacontemporary presented itself as particularly dynamic and forward-looking this year.

Diego Bianchi: Errores Irreales
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda

Artists

Participating artists

Abaseh Mirvali

is a curator and cultural project producer with a career-long commitment to civic engagement and public service through innovative collaborations between contemporary art initiatives and the community at large. Mirvali is currently the Artistic Director at viennacontemporary. For the 2025 viennacontemporary edition, she created a bold program for the fair, which included the participation of 97 galleries and 5 institutions from 23 countries. Between 2018 and 2020, Mirvali served as executive director and chief curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB), in California, presenting artists like artist Lara Favaretto and Ari Benjamin Meyers. Mirvali is the author of the concept and program development of the 2013 edition of The Biennial of the Americas, where she served executive director and comisaria from 2011 to 2013. Between 2005 and 2009, Mirvali was the executive director of the Colección/​Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

Sandro Droschl

*1970 Graz, lives in Graz

is founding director and curator of the institution HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. From 2012 to 2020 he directed the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien. Since 2000 he worked as curator, then also as director for the Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz, besides as guest curator at other institutions. He curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and edited over 30 publications. Droschl made a study iregulare, ​“Body. Media. Art,” with art (Isabelle Graw, Free Class), philosophy, journalism and medicine at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, University of Vienna and London Guildhall University.

More contributions

Exhibition Tour
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda

Video

A metabolic force governs the growth of Celina Eceiza’s work, which involves textile collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings — both tiny and colossal in scale — as laborious as they are elementary. The artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, found object collages and, more recently, chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity. 

Ausstellungsrundgang Celina Eceiza

Annemarie Arzberger
dreamed awake

Slide show

For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist has developed her first own performative presentation, with a setting for her puppets with three scenes set in an imaginary spaceship, an exhibition, and the spaces that the scenes depict: the Schlouflaboar, the Houloudecks, and the Space Grotto Disco. The piece is a combination of physical theater and puppetry, performed by the artist together with her sister Katharina Arzberger and accompanied by musical interludes arranged by Manuel Obriejtan.

Slide Show Annemarie Arzberger

Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales

Slide show

Diego Bianchi (*1969 Buenos Aires, lives in Buenos Aires) is considered one of Argentina’s leading artists and has, in particular, updated the concept of sculpture. For his installative and performative exhibition Errores Irreales at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Bianchi has assembled a selection of his sculptures that play with the concept of the body.

Slide show Diego Bianchi

Celina Eceiza
Ofrenda

Slide show

Ofrenda [Offering] presents a way of inhabiting a space as if the architecture were a body, breathing erratically, changing states as you pass from one room to the next. The rigidity of the building collapses as the walls are draped in thousands of metres of fabric joined together through the collective and timeless action of sewing, until they form a single smooth surface, sensitive to the slightest change.

Slide show Celina Eceiza

Morning Séance
alias Simone Borghi 

Video

Italian composer and sound artist Simone Borghi, alias Morning Séance, expands Celina Eceiza’s ​“soft museum” in her exhibition Ofrenda at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark with his atmospheric, constantly changing music, using his musical performance to enable visitors to experience physicality, space, and perception in new ways. 

Morning Séance alias Simone Borghi

Annemarie Arzberger
dreamed awake

Video

Annemarie Arzberger has developed her first original piece for HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, combining her lush, detailed, and often bizarre imagery into a multi-layered stage work that combines physical and puppet theater, dance, lipsync, music, and language. In a three-part, dreamlike theatrical spaceship setting, she brings psychological states, childlike imagination, and social issues to life through characters such as Dolores and the Angst sisters in a performative, poetic, playful, yet disturbing scenario.

Annemarie Arzberger dreamt awake