Skip to content

On Conditions
Marina Vishmidt 

Video

The Video is available in English

The American author and critic Marina Vishmidt deals with the tension between art, value and labor from a (post-) marxist perspective. She considers the so-called cultural industry as a driving economic force and examines the increasing expansion of the logic of the financial market and its influence on artistic production. Ultimately, her research also involves an examination of the autonomy of art, which raises questions about capitalist value creation, about creativity as ideology, and about social crises and precarity. To what extent is collective action also made more difficult in an industry driven by personal branding? 

Marina Vishmidt’s online lecture sheds light on her engagement with conceptual art, which she examines in terms of its production contexts and value around the notion of labor.

Artists

Participating artists

Marina Vishmidt

*1976

is an American writer, editor, and critic. She is a lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London and teaches art theory at the Netherlands Art Institute in Arnhem. Her work is primarily concerned with the connection between art, value, and labor, focusing on the increasing dissolution of international financial markets and their influence on subjectivation in the artistic field. Vishmidt publishes in various magazines and journals such as Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope and OPEN! She is on the editorial board of the book series New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society (Bloomsbury Academic) and the journal South as a State of Mind. Recent publications include: Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018), Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (2016).

More contributions

A.rtificial I.ntrospection O.
Exhibition Tour 

Slide show

The exhibition A.rtificial I.ntrospection O. (A.I.O.) explores questions of thought, perception, and subjectivity at the intersection of introspection, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. Its point of departure is the work of the Austrian writer, cognitive psychologist, and cybernetician Oswald Wiener (1935 – 2021), whose genuine thinking since the 1950s critically navigated between these fields while systematically resisting institutional appropriation.

Slide Show A.rtificial I.ntrospection O.

Kathy Rae Huffman
FROM CYBERFEMINISM 
UNTIL NOW

Video

Kathy Rae Huffman’s lecture traces the evolution of cyberfeminism since the 1990s: it connected women in the digital sphere, challenged existing power structures, and presented examples — from VNS Matrix to contemporary digital activism — that highlight critiques of platform corporations, AI cultures, and global inequalities.

Kathy Rae Huffman 

Xol Meissner
Concert 

Video

New York-based artist Xol Meissner — the alter ego of composer Mauro Hertig — has transformed the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark into a hypnotic soundscape of extraordinary intensity with his haunting music, which oscillates between contemporary classical and avant-garde rock.

Xol Meissner

Karin M. Schmidlechner 
Styrian women during and after National Socialism

Video

In her research and in the volume Aus dem Blickfeld (Out of Sight), co-edited with Heimo Halbrainer, Karin Maria Schmidlechner demonstrates that the lived realities of Styrian women during the Nazi era and the postwar period were diverse and ambivalent. Hence, she broadens the scholarly discourse on their daily lives while simultaneously deconstructing common narratives such as that of the conformist woman or the so-called rubble woman.”

Karin M. Schmidlechner 

Eva Ursprung
The Art of Surfacing

Slide show

Eva Ursprung, _Dock_, 2026

With the exhibition The Art of Surfacing, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents the multifaceted work of Austrian artist, musician, and curator Eva Ursprung, who was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Province of Styria in 2024. Her cross-media, feminist, and socially critical approaches revolve around the element of water as a metaphor for change and political and ecological processes.

Slide show Eva Ursprung

Susanne Wenger
Àdùnní Olórìṣà

Slide show

Susanne Wenger gilt als eine zentrale Künstlerin Österreichs nach 1945 und als frühe Wegbereiterin des Surrealismus. Ihr Œuvre, das Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Drucke und Batiken umfasst, überschreitet ästhetische Kategorien und verbindet Kunst, Spiritualität und Mythos. 

Slide Show Susanne Wenger