VIENNA BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021 PLANET LOVE. Climate Care in the Digital Age

Fourth edition of the multidisciplinary biennale starts in late May 2021

28 May – 3 October 2021

We should love our planet. It is the only one that provides the ideal cli-matic conditions for human life. There is no planet B yet. If we love Earth, we have to care for it with passion and dedication. Provocatively entitled PLANET LOVE. Climate Care in the Digital Age, the #vienna BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021 encourages visitors to stop and reconsider and demands that every sociopolitical force and every individual take resolute action to sustainably address the massive challenge of our age: climate care.

In exhibitions and discussion projects the organizers of the #vienna BIEN-NALE FOR CHANGE 2021—the MAK, the University of Applied Arts #vienna, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Architekturzentrum Wien, and the #vienna Busi-ness Agency, as well as the KUNST HAUS WIEN as a new partner and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as an non-university research part-ner—are bringing together visionary designs and exceptional ideas by art-ists, designers, and architects who make a radical change to our societies and economies irresistible in the interests of PLANET LOVE and sustaina-ble climate care.

“PLANET LOVE means a fundamentally new relationship between #people and the Earth. We have to work toward a relationship that does not aim at maximizing the exploitation of the Earth’s resources, but that approaches its biological beauty and diversity with humility, respect, appreciation, and above all uses them considerately,” according to #christophthunhohenstein, General Director of the MAK and Initiator and Head of the #vienna BIENNALE.

The #vienna BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021 aspires to fire our imagina-tions, promote the vision of ecosocially sustainable societies and econo-mies, and offer innovative ideas and solutions: to mitigate the climate cri-sis, to restore and preserve ecosystems, to maintain biodiversity, and to use digital technologies for the benefit of the climate and environment.

VIENNA BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021—exhibitions and projects:

CLIMATE CARE: Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures

A MAK exhibition

Anab Jain, Designer and Professor of Design Investigations, University of Applied Arts, #vienna; Hubert Klumpner, Architect and Professor of Archi-tecture and Urban Design, ETH Zürich; Marlies Wirth, Curator Digital Cul-ture and MAK Design Collection; Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, MAK Gen-eral Director and Head of the #vienna BIENNALE MAK Exhibition Hall (ground floor)

CLIMATE CARE. Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures is the MAK's com-prehensive, interdisciplinary main contribution to the #vienna BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021. Based on the idea that Planet Love is not an one-way street, but that the Earth is capable of loving us back in many different ways, the exhibition explores a range of encouraging approaches for achieving radical civilizational change: a Great Transformation of society, economy, and politics, inspired by multifaceted contributions from design, arts, architecture, urbanism, technology, as well as social and cultural initi-atives.

Climate Care cannot be reduced to efforts to decarbonize and achieve cli-mate neutrality. Instead, it needs a holistic vision that places ecology at the center and emphatically incorporates social aspects – a transforma-tive vision that is intergenerational and committed to climate justice. On this basis, the interdisciplinary exhibition reflects on the potential of cli-mate mitigation, adaptation, geoengineering, regeneration, and circular thinking in different contexts and paints a positive picture of cross-species cooperation for Planet Earth’s “more-than-human” future.

The design of our environment and climate, with a special focus on areas of life and spheres of action, such as dwelling, nurturing, movement, coop-erating, generating, health, and culture, is an essential contribution to a new "climate society." To help achieve it, the potentials of design strate-gies, the arts, urbanism, and new technologies can provide critical ideas and impulses for individual and collective agency.

New approaches conceived from a global perspective are also reflecting #vienna: The exhibition will critically examine #vienna – year after year named one of the most livable cities in the world – for untapped potential. In this respect, the exhibition undertakes to question and rethink the city as a representation of our world, uncover its processes, and develop model paths for a climate-caring community.

In the face of the risks posed by the overall ecological crisis, the exhibition suggests a radical change of direction. It is engaging in a variety of "micro-revolutions" that condense into one grand visionary narrative: the narrative of a global community of all species of the Earth, natural or artificially gen-erated, creating the conditions for hopeful paths to common sustainable futures.

ECOLOGIES AND POLITICS OF THE LIQUID, SOLID, AND GLOWING (Working title)

An exhibition by the University of Applied Arts Vienna

Curators: Ibrahim Mahama, Artist; Baerbel Mueller, Architect; Elisabeth Falkensteiner, Curator

AIL – Angewandte Innovation Laboratory, 1010 #vienna, Georg-Coch-Platz 2 (former Postal Savings Bank)

The exhibition ECOLOGIES AND POLITICS OF THE LIQUID, SOLID, AND GLOWING (working title) aims not only to look at climate care from a tech-nological and design-oriented perspective, but also to take into account ecological relationships and their political implications, especially with regard to (neo)colonial and capitalist structures in the Global South. With video works, installations, and a supporting program, the exhibition fo-cuses on intertwined processes between the environment, capital, and exploitation and will present non-Western artistic positions on the topic of climate care. In addition, the University of Applied Arts will show installa-tion works by graduates in public spaces.

INES DOUJAK: Landscape Painting

An exhibition by the KUNST HAUS WIEN

Curator: Verena Kaspar-Eisert

KUNST HAUS and courtyard, Untere Weißgerberstraße 13, 1030 #vienna 28 May – 22 August 2021

For her exhibition project Landscape Painting, the artist Ines Doujak is working with natural materials collected and archived from #vienna and Lower Austria: dried plants, mushrooms, seeds, pulverized flowers, leaves, berries, wood, ash, clay, stones, and sand. She has developed her installa-tion using a process-oriented approach with the help of this natural ar-chive, which she uses—akin to an artist’s palette—as the medium for her art. In her central work landraub [Land Grab], Doujak addresses a highly topical political subject. Panels hanging on trees in public spaces docu-ment historical representations of apple varieties alongside quotations from so-called “land-grabbers,” in other words commenting on land-grab-bing over the last 400 years. These quotes make clear that the unscrupu-lous expropriation and expulsion by corporations, states, and investors of rural populations worldwide is a highly topical phenomenon. Another di-mension of land grabs referenced in the work is the destruction of global biodiversity through the rise of monocultures.

Since 2014 KUNST HAUS WIEN has built upon Friedensreich Hundertwas-ser’s forward-looking ideas by curating an exhibition space for artists who engage in critical and visionary reflections on ecology and the environ-ment. In 2018 KUNST HAUS WIEN became the first museum to be awarded the Austrian Ecolabel.

EAT LOVE: Tomorrow’s Food and Food Spaces

A joint project by the #vienna Business Agency and the MAK

Curator: Hubert Klumpner

Curatorial Team: Elisabeth Noever-Ginthör, Alice Jacubasch MAK Exhibition Hall (ground floor) and other venues in Vienna

The biennale project EAT LOVE: Tomorrow’s Food and Food Spaces con-templates what and where we will eat in the future. Building on the over-arching theme of the biennale, PLANET LOVE, the project explores the cre-ative and innovative possibilities for the future of food and table culture, the transformation of our foodstuffs and forms of nutrition, new means of production, and the places where we consume. At the heart of the exhibi-tion are new views of togetherness in the city and the question of the pro-spects of the local in a realm that continues to be defined by global mar-ket realities. The project focuses on sites of collective experience and the integrative potential of food culture in the city.

EAT LOVE: Tomorrow’s Food and Food Spaces constitutes a separate sec-tion of the MAK exhibition CLIMATE CARE: Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures and will also be displayed in other select venues in #vienna. A sym-posium of the same name will be held during the biennale as part of the project.

A new commission by SUPERFLUX

A MAK exhibition 

Curator: Marlies Wirth, Curator, Digital Culture and MAK Design Collection MAK Exhibition Hall (ground floor, Central Hall)

In this immersive installation commissioned by the MAK exclusively for the #vienna BIENNALE 2021, Superflux transports visitors to a more-than-human vision of a post-anthropocentric future. Founded in 2009 by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, the Anglo-Indian design and art studio Superflux cre-ates worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire us to confront the precariousness of a rapidly changing world. Walk through trees burnt and blackened by the hubris of another time, their skeletal remains now grace-fully returning their fertility to the earth around them. The #green glow of new life is a visible sign of nature’s resurgence as spirited ferns push past buried plastic and wild grasses dance amid adolescent trees. Stop, take a breath, forget the division of time, the conquest of power, and the borders between nations. Edge closer, bend over the glistening water, and im-merse yourself in a mirror image in which worlds collide: you are becom-ing human in a more-than-human world.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Hori-zon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 870759.

FOSTER: The Soil and Water Residency

A MAK exhibition

Concept: Angelika Loderer and Marlies Wirth

Curator: Marlies Wirth, Curator, Digital Culture and MAK Design Collection MAK DESIGN LAB (Central Room)

The exhibition FOSTER presents new works developed by the artists who participated in the project Foster: The Soil and Water Residency in 2020. It was initiated by the artist Angelika Loderer during the coronavirus crisis in a self-harvest garden in #vienna.

The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world,” writes Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces (1967) on what he calls “heterotopias.” Here, the garden is a symbol of a real utopia, a fragile ecosystem whose tipping point may arrive at any moment, whose para-disial condition must be fought hard and constantly cared for. Participating artists: Dejan Dukic, Luna Ghisetti, Sophie Hirsch, Minna Liebhart, Angelika Loderer, Irina Lotarevich, Roman Pfeffer, Lucia Elena Průša, Aline Sofie Rainer, Hans Schabus, Myles Starr, Edin Zenun

CLIMATE PANDEMICS

A MAK exhibition 

Curator: Marlies Wirth, Curator, Digital Culture and MAK Design Collection MAK CREATIVE CLIMATE CARE GALLERY

Through the lens of literature (Climate Fiction), fine artists explore the pos-sible impact of the climate crisis and pandemic outbreaks in CLIMATE PANDEMICS. The effects of epidemics and climate catastrophes are the subject of many post-apocalyptic narratives and novels by authors like Margaret Atwood or James Graham Ballard. How will human society adapt to the new reality? What new, genetically modified species will come from it? And how can we attempt to live “post-apocalyptically” with-out first having to live through the apocalypse? Topics like these will be addressed by the artworks on view in the exhibition.

GETTING WET

Discursive #Event series by the Kunsthalle Wien 

Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

The relationship between technology and nature is mostly based on a logic of extraction facilitated by colonial legal mechanisms and late capi-talism. A series of discursive Events organized by the Kunsthalle Wien will aim at rethinking the notion of technology by shifting from mere appre-hension of nature toward close attention to it.

The program focuses on water as an element but also as an idea that will make our categories of thought erode and reconfigures our planetary rela-tionships. It will look at non-human technologies and at water as knowledge, as well as at the movement of the sea and its waves, low and high tides, the Earth and the sky, the fermentation of seaweed, evapora-tion, immigration, blood and sweat …

The program invites us to question the ethics that drive our present.

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 

A conference at the Az W – Architekturzentrum Wien

Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna 

A new attitude to the planet and all its inhabitants, as addressed by the #vienna BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021 under the title PLANET LOVE, re-quires collaboration between a wide range of disciplines. In a symposium at the Architekturzentrum Wien, stakeholders from architecture, art, de-sign, ecology, and the economy will discuss multifarious approaches to climate care. The conference’s program is being jointly organized by all partner institutions of the #vienna BIENNALE. In particular, the Archi-tekturzentrum Wien will draw on its multiyear work on a new caring urban-ism.

Photos are available for download in the press area of the website viennabiennale.org/en or via MAK.at/en/press.

The VIENNA BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021: PLANET LOVE.

Climate Care in the Digital Age

is organized by

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts University of Applied Arts #vienna – Angewandte Innovation Laboratory Kunsthalle Wien 

KUNST HAUS WIEN Az W – Architekturzentrum Wien #vienna Business Agency

Research partner:

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology

The sponsors of the #vienna BIENNALE FOR CHANGE 2021 will be announced in spring 2021.