SALZBURG.- Agnes Scherer’s exhibition Three Wicked Games departs from an inventory of contemporary obsessions and lets it drift backwards, or sideways, into two so-called tapestry cartoons by Francisco Goya: Blind Man’s Bluff (1789) and The Straw Manikin (1791). Both depict folk games. The artist recognises in these games a structure that feels uncannily contemporary. In both compositions, a powerless figure occupies the centre. Around it, society arranges itself as choreography. Someone is blind, someone is thrown, someone laughs, and someone waits for their turn. To these games, Scherer adds a third, imagined scene that likewise suggests play.

Scherer translates Blind Man’s Bluff and The Straw Manikin into a ghostly puppet-theatre. While she quotes Goya’s compositions almost one-to-one, she empties the figures of their bodily fullness. The intact figure no longer feels right, Scherer insists. It belongs to a fantasy of coherence that the present cannot support. What interests the artist more than the body is life under conditions of late capitalism, defined by a loop of for-profit transactions and ongoing dependencies.

freakygreenfish: Bot On Bot Crime: How to Vibe Compute Reality in the Trenches of Memetic Warfare
May 22–July 12
Studio

What initially appears to the viewer as a spatial translation of the social media sphere—a walkable platform—quickly reveals itself as an environment organized by the logics of computational propagation. Bot on Bot Crime is built on and from mechanisms of circulation and control.

At stake here is not merely the presence of bots within life and its cultures, but their function as engines of amplification. freakygreenfish’s environment makes visible a condition that still remains hidden for a large part of society, namely, that contemporary discourse is shaped by what is made to circulate. The installation unfolds as a system in which short-form videos are produced and simultaneously posted on TikTok. In this sense, the work aligns with an understanding of automated agents as infrastructural forces: entities that do not replace human actors but modulate their visibility, accelerate their reach, and recalibrate the thresholds of relevance. The exhibition acknowledges a field already saturated with automated influence, where reactionary and opportunistic actors have optimized the system for speed, repetition, and affective triggers. freakygreenfish’s proposition is to test whether it can be rerouted.

The exhibitions are commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein and curated by Mirela Baciak.

Deva Schubert: missed tones (in the corridor)
June 10, 8pm & June 12, 9pm
Performance

missed tones (in the corridor) stages communication as something perpetually on the verge of coherence. In the hiccup, in the stutter, in the distributed melody that only exists between two voices, Schubert locates a choreography of relation, one in which connection is fragile and surprising.

Schubert’s new piece is conceived as a voice and body score for two performers in the basement corridor of Salzburger Kunstverein. The performance begins with a sound somewhere ahead, around a corner, slightly out of sight.

In essence, the performance asks: how can unreadability be produced through voice? The vocal material oscillates between the technical and the animalistic, the mechanical and the other-worldly. Clicks, breaths, glottal interruptions, tonal fragments, pulses that resemble malfunctioning systems or non-human calls.

The performance is commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein and SZENE Salzburg.