VIENNA.- The so-called white cube is a seemingly “neutral” and “pure” space with plain-white walls that is supposed to ensure the undisturbed autonomy of art. The Hauptraum, the largest gallery of Secession, is one of the earliest and most representative examples of it.

Like many artists who have exhibited here, Yuki Okumura took its empty state as a departure point for his process. But instead of bringing works to this ideal backdrop to isolate art from the world, the artist conceived three site-specific projects to rediscover the space as a lived room interconnected with the world marked by its own conditions and contexts. For each project, Okumura designed a playful procedure and asked people related to the space to enact it.

Wilhelm as Hauptraum (2025) documents Okumura’s interview of Wilhelm “Willi” Montibeller, the former head of Secession’s installation team who worked here for more than twenty years. Instructed by the artist, Willi personifies the space by saying “my name is Hauptraum”, “I am the space”, and so on, yet sharing his own subjective recollections of some of the exhibitions he set up in the very space, in front of a miniature model of it. The camera focuses on his hands tracing in the air the forms of works that are absent in the scene yet exist in his memory.

For Secession’s Hive Mind(s) (2025), Okumura requested the board of Secession, consisting of artists and architects, to discuss a possible renaming of the Hauptraum, a name that connotes an unwanted hierarchy by literally meaning “main space”. Okumura then approached our press person Ramona “Mona” Heinlein (who is me myself, in charge of this very text co-edited by the artist) and had her translate a German transcript of the board’s meeting into English all alone, verbally. As a result, the speaker in the video seems to have multiple personalities, just like how the board has many voices internally yet speaks as one voice outwardly, mediated by the press office. In a nod to the “hive mind”, a sci-fi term for collective consciousness, the monologue is accompanied by footage of beehives on the roof of Secession. Several colonies of bees live there, taken care of by one of our current chief installers Hans Weinberger.

Entering the exhibition, you first do not see either video but only hear Willi’s or Mona’s voice, as if the space were talking to you directly or you were in the head of its mastermind.

If these two projects narrate the biography of the space by examining its historical and institutional contexts, respectively, then Big White Empty Playground (2025) aims at tackling its personality by testing its physical conditions. Okumura invited those who regularly or intensely work in the Hauptraum to participate in this project. The interested members of Secession’s cleaning, education, security and exhibition set-up staff attended a series of workshop sessions conducted by Okumura that revolved around a chance-oriented, curiosity-driven, game-like method for art-making that he has developed with reference to conceptual art, experimental music, and postmodern dance. Each person was encouraged to conceive three sets of simple instructions for them to perform “auto-active”, “counter-active”, and “inter-active” actions in the empty Hauptraum, using only their own bodies and things readily available in the building. Every procedure is inspired by and interventional into certain material aspects of the space, based on the person’s own relation with it over the years. Direct outcomes remain and constitute Big White Playground, a group exhibition taking over the room almost entirely.

Updating institutional critique in human terms, those projects explore how the conditions and contexts of the Hauptraum have been, can be, and will be shaped through personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal forces. Or, it is perhaps the other way around: as the artist states, it might be the space itself that uses us to reveal and renew its personality and biography, through each of our individual bodies and lives – conditions and contexts – as a unique agent or translator.

Participating artists of Big White Playground: Miriam Bachmann; Mario Batram; Paul Buschnegg; Said Gärtner; golden salamturtle; Grzegorz Kielawski; Emine Koza; Niklas Hofstetter; Yuki Okumura; Flavio Palasciano; Alex Pasch; Cristina Rüesch; Sebastian Scholz; Paul Spendier; Johanna Steiner; Lorenz Sutter; Kai Philip Trausenegger; Hans Weinberger; Marit Wolters; Márton Zalka

Yuki Okumura was born in Aomori in 1978. He lives and works mainly in the Central European Time zone.

Programmed by the board of the Secession

Curated by Bettina Spörr