SALZBURG.- Storytelling across personal and grander narratives are a key focus of Salzburger Kunstverein's spring exhibitions. Salzburger Kunstverein presents variations on an irreverent self that resists authority and hegemony, and counters narratives of genius. Exhibitions also confront fading democracy as evident globally in counterpoint with failing memory—both historical memory and individual memory. In correlation, the topic of migration emerges, combined with ideas of writing and rewriting history. And finally, a ghost has appeared in our hallway, and is not expected to leave any time soon.

Main Gallery
Gernot Wieland
Gernot Wieland makes films, drawings, performances and playful installations that examine conditions of fact and fiction, often existing between dreamscapes, storytelling, reality and neuroses of recollection. Gernot Wieland’s work unravels the stasis of the past. Deciphering the manners by which we dissect our individual histories, the artist questions how the wistful reveries of nostalgia both affix and displace the textual layers of our imagined selves. Memory in Wieland’s films is not something passively inert; instead it vibrates with agency and life, surging into the present with a combined dose of humour and sincerity. Gernot Wieland was 2019 winner of the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics.

Ring Gallery
Omer Fast (continues until 2025)
In 2019, Salzburger Kunstverein commissioned Omer Fast to make his film, Der oylem iz a goylem, based on a Jewish fairytale. From 2020 Salzburger Kunstverein presents a long-term installation of Fast’s The Invisible Hand, based on the same fairytale, where a ghost brings a curse upon a family. Shot in Guangzhou, China on a 3D VR camera, and premiered at the Guangdong Times Museum, the work was shut down due to the reasoning that there are no more ghosts in China since the founding of the People’s Republic.

Kabinett Gallery
The Museum of Broadcasting and Loneliness by Declan Clarke includes a new film, Saturn and Beyond, combined with objects the artist has salvaged from a museum of broadcasting, which his late father established out of his passion for the history of communications and Ireland’s minor but important role in modernization.