KLAGENFURT.- Herein lies a paradox: glitch moves, but glitch also blocks.
It incites movement while simultaneously creating an obstacle.
Glitch prompts and glitch prevents. With this, glitch becomes a catalyst,
opening up new pathways, allowing us to seize on new directions. […]
Thus, glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological
mechanics: it helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force,
a new way to take on the world. — Legacy Russell
What if a supposedly stable system begins to slip, even slips out of hand, because of a tiny little mistake? If ruptures, cracks, and faults not only distort but also make what was previously a matter of course all the more tangible? If the emergence of otherwise invisible infrastructures unintentionally creates something new? In its 2025 annual program “Glitch” and for its 20th anniversary, Kunstraum Lakeside explores the potential of temporary disruptions beyond human control. The short circuits our technical devices increasingly produce are but one starting point. Obstacles are the principle, in both artistic and societal contexts. We see the glitch as a necessary when not welcome social, technological, and cultural interruption of the everyday. An interruption that counters the violence of homogeneity and celebrates diversity in the form of slippery snakes and ladders. The artists selected for this annual program navigate in these realms, experimenting with the necessity of the glitch, which Legacy Russell, the author of Glitch Feminism (London: Verso, 2020), refers to as a “state of opacity” and an “incessant cutting and stitching, breaking and healing.”
Maruša Sagadin
Opening: February 4, 2025, 6pm
Exhibition: February 5–March 21, 2025
Olena Newkryta
Opening: April 8, 2025, 6pm
Exhibition: April 9–May 23, 2025
edging—bodies without orgasms
Curated by Michał Leszuk
Opening: June 12, 2025, 6pm
Exhibition: June 13–August 14, 2025
Jonas Morgenthaler
Opening: September 23, 2025, 6pm
Exhibition: September 24–November 7, 2025
Mara Novak
Opening: November 25, 2025, 6pm
Exhibition: November 26, 2025–January 16, 2026
In the 2025 exhibition season, Maruša Sagadin explores the ambiguity of prescribed spatial categories and functionalities. She creates sculptural works that accentuate spaces while opening them to a variety of uses, and as such undermine conventional codes. Olena Newkryta examines the complexity of the social fabric and collaborative forms of knowledge production with a keen eye for the latent potentials of the glitch in all processes of image and knowledge production. Under the title edging—bodies without orgasms, Michał Leszuk curates a group exhibition at Kunstraum Lakeside that expands the annual theme “Glitch” with artistic positions that open the world to a queer language and bring it to the edge of the hegemonic dominance of majority society. The exhibition will include artworks by Apparatus 22, Albin Bergström, Luca Büchler, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, and Francis Whorrall-Campbell. In autumn, Jonas Morgenthaler employs his so called “xenobjects” to investigate the impacts exhibited objects have on narrative systems and to subvert their normative effects. His objective is to identify the underlying connection between the elements not through the production of meaning but by disrupting their very parameters. Through malfunctions in human perception, Mara Novak addresses glacial melting, biodiversity depletion, and cognitive dissonance in view of anthropogenic global warming. She poses the question of whether our prevailing economic system might rather be a glitch in the planetary order.
Curated by Gudrun Ratzinger and Franz Thalmair.
