GRAZ.- Camera Austria is presenting Luise Marchand: Prospects of Winning, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria, opening Friday, June 19, 2026, at 6 p.m. Curated by Christin Müller, the exhibition will be on view from June 20 through August 30, 2026, at Camera Austria in Graz.
Across three groups of works, Marchand examines the economies of desire, the dynamics of capitalist profit-seeking, and the uneasy relationship between work and play. Her photographs, videos, installations, and staged objects draw on the slick visual language of advertising, only to turn that language against itself. What at first appears seductive or playful soon opens onto sharper questions about labor, self-optimization, exhaustion, and the pressure to keep producing.
At the center of the exhibition are snails crawling across banknotes, high-performance lifestyle products, and the bodies of workers. Together, these images form a pointed reflection on a world shaped by speed, competition, flexibility, and crisis. Marchand looks closely at how both people and nature are asked to adjust to systems of value creation, often at the expense of rest, vulnerability, and genuine well-being.
One of the exhibition’s key works is Zeit ist Geld – eine Schnecke ist eine Schnecke (Time Is Money — A Snail Is a Snail, 2021), a series that began when a garden snail crossed Marchand’s tax return during the pandemic. From that small, accidental encounter, the artist developed a striking image of slow life moving across the symbols of finance. Snails glide over coins, banknotes, and plastic money, leaving behind traces of slime. Their quiet presence becomes a form of resistance to the ideals of productivity and performance that dominate capitalist societies.
In Graz, this series is presented in poster form, recalling Marchand’s 2021 intervention during Berlin Art Week, when she placed 1,200 posters from the project throughout the city. At a time of lockdowns, cancelled events, closed offices, and economic uncertainty, the snail became a strangely powerful figure of delay and deceleration.
The exhibition also includes Die Zeichen stehen gut (The Signs Are Good, 2016–ongoing), a group of works focused on the products and rituals through which contemporary bodies are pushed toward constant readiness. Compression tights, kinesiology tape, dietary supplements, disposable tableware, all-weather clothing, touchscreen gloves, and other objects appear as tools for sustaining the always-active body. Marchand photographs these products with the polish of advertising imagery, but her installation makes the photographs themselves appear vulnerable: they hang freely, bending and moving along metal arches, revealing the fragility behind glossy surfaces.
Her newest group of works, Schicht zur Sonne (Shift toward the Sun, 2026), turns toward labor and social mobility. For this project, Marchand took a job as a rotational employee at McDonald’s, using the experience to explore the structures and promises of low-wage work. The video moves between the Chamber of Labor in Linz, the industrial landscape of voestalpine AG, and the fast-food workplace, where processes are synchronized, divided into shifts, and driven by the rhythm of machines, screens, and beeping signals.
The work expands into the exhibition space through a game-like floor installation that recalls Monopoly and its predecessor, Elizabeth Magie Phillips’s The Landlord’s Game, originally conceived to expose the consequences of wealth accumulation and economic inequality. Marchand adapts this format to the realities of low-income workers, replacing dreams of easy financial victory with tasks such as WORK, STAY, PAY, FRYER, and CHANCE.
The exhibition’s title, Prospects of Winning, points to the promises and illusions that structure both games and economies. Winning, in Marchand’s world, is never simple. It may depend on work, luck, deception, endurance, or the ability to bend the rules. Her images ask what it means to keep playing when the game has already been designed in someone else’s favor.
Marchand’s practice is rooted in photography, but it extends into space through posters, sculptural installations, video, and staged environments. Her work consistently returns to the visual codes of advertising, exposing how desire is produced, circulated, and disciplined. At the same time, her projects leave room for humor and subversive self-empowerment: a snail crossing a tax return, a worker peeling Monopoly stickers from discarded packaging, or a hand juggling too many lifestyle products at once.
Born from close observation of everyday life, Prospects of Winning offers a sharp and often witty portrait of postindustrial society. It asks visitors to consider what bodies, workers, consumers, and even snails reveal about the systems that define contemporary ideas of success.
Luise Marchand: Prospects of Winning is curated by Christin Müller and runs at Camera Austria, Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz, Austria, from June 20 to August 30, 2026. The opening takes place on Friday, June 19, 2026, at 6 p.m.
