VIENNA.- Freedom should not be an individual state but a practice of sharing. Those who are free bear the responsibility to pass that freedom on—to other bodies, voices, and materials. In this sense, the exhibition brings together three artistic positions that do not depict freedom but practice it as movement and collective experience. Systems of Subversion shows how art can shift entrenched structures, and how freedom can be understood as a process, transgression as a method, and subversion as a shared practice. What unites Allen-Golder Carpenter, Paulina Aumayr and Thomas Supper is that they dissolve boundaries across different media and transform systems from within rather than merely criticizing them.

Born in Washington D.C., Allen-Golder Carpenter combines sculpture, sound, painting and photography into a polyphonic network that explores cultural identity, surveillance and movement. At its center lies the question of how physical and symbolic borders emerge and how they can be dissolved again. In the installation Jazz Window (2025), this principle becomes directly tangible. Printed film panels with fence motifs hang freely in the space and are set in motion by fans. The supposed barrier begins to breathe, and border structures start to flow. The illusion of the fence refers to national control, deportation and state violence, while at the same time pointing to the utopian moment of freedom of movement. Another work shows masks on the floor as relics of violent, anonymous authority, referencing and inverting the aesthetics of urban subculture.

The installation is accompanied by jazz melodies by Carpenter himself, hip-hop, rap, clarinet, and saxophone recordings. For him, jazz is not only a musical genre but a historical medium of Black self-empowerment, improvisation and resistance. In his newly composed pieces, the boundaries between genres dissolve and the dynamics between origin and appropriation—from “Black Protest Sound” to white high culture—are renegotiated.

Through painting and photography, Carpenter also examines visibility and censorship of Black experience. While his blackened paintings and screen prints resemble censored images, his photographs show scenes from Washington D.C., such as Go-Go music festivals, street protests and family moments. The coexistence of community life and military presence, of music and surveillance, becomes a metaphor for social contradictions. Carpenter’s transmedial work combines sound, movement and imagery into a political manifesto on borders, and on individual and collective identity.

Paulina Aumayr explores the mechanisms of power and corporeality through a visual language that always stands on the threshold between intimacy and aggression. In the series Bis meine Haut zu Leder wird (2025), she condenses this tension into a body-political image. The skin as a boundary between inside and outside, as a site of touch and injury, of romantic tenderness and sexual threat.

Aumayr’s painting makes violence felt, not just visible. Dogs with bared teeth appear repeatedly as ciphers of threatening masculinity. At the same time, her work is about certain bodies that endure and keep going until what feminist theorist Sara Ahmed calls “affective exhaustion.” A fatigue that arises from resistance itself, and which Aumayr processes in her new work Bis ihr genauso müde seid wie ich. / Männer (Hunde) (2025). Her series are thus shaped by repetition as resistance and exhaustion as a form of protest. “It happens because it does not stop happening,” says Aumayr.

In the installation works Der Geschmack von Metall, erstick daran (2025) and Eintausendeinhundert Klingen für dich (2025), the artist translates painting into three-dimensional space. The bed and the pillow, symbols of comfort and safety, are covered with the confrontational imagery of her paintings or even with sharp blades. Softness meets danger, intimacy meets injury, and the private meets exposure. These moments of tension run throughout her entire work. Aumayr reveals how structures of violence infiltrate everyday life and how art can create spaces where anger, pain and strength can coexist.

Thomas Supper deals with the question of how material decays and what remains when form and substance dissolve. His series Reduktionen (since 2023) begins with a single black painting that is repeatedly cast in bronze. With each casting, the image shrinks, losing sharpness, mass and contour. The work documents its own decline—a gradual abstraction in which reproduction becomes reduction. Each bronze bears traces of the previous one, forming a cycle of loss and transformation until it disappears completely. Supper describes this work as “a painting that cancels itself out.” After casting, he applies a patina to each surface, allowing painterly elements to merge into sculptural form.

Supper’s artistic practice usually moves between concept and process, between control and chance. His works emerge from observing material reactions and physical transformations—almost as if the work creates and dissolves itself at the same time. Like Carpenter and Aumayr, Supper undermines existing systems—not social or political ones, but material ones. He shows that subversion does not always have to be loud; it can also lie in the quiet erosion of form.

Together, the three artists create a dense network of sound, material, color and body, crossing medial and semantic boundaries. The interdisciplinary works of Aumayr, Carpenter and Supper share an aesthetic and political gesture. They subvert existing systems by exposing their structures and making them permeable.
Systems of Subversion shows that freedom does not lie in the absence of systems but in their constant renegotiation. Transmediality, hybridity and subversion become practices of seeing, feeling and making, and freedom a continuous process—something that must always be passed on.

-Text by Dr. Luisa Seipp