Secession Podcast

Shortly before the opening on 28 November 2026, Cevdet Erek talks with curator Bettina Spörr about his exhibition and sound installation on Secession's façade.

Cevdet Erek
Secessions-Ornamentik 
29.11.2025 – 22.2.2026

Some of Cevdet Erek’s site-specific installations and sonic environments, placed at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and architecture, evolve around the idea of ‘sound ornamentation’. With this term, the artist refers to Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime (1908) amongst others. This text celebrates lack of ornamentation as the mark of a ‘cultivated’ society. Loos’ polemic is key to a moralising discourse that once sought to purge architecture of decoration in the name of progress. In that context, ornament – associated with sensuality, femininity, and excess – was condemned as wasteful and irrational. Loos’ text linked ornament to primitivism and degeneration, framing modern Western culture as superior to the supposedly ‘undeveloped’. Such rhetoric not only marginalised the close relationship between ornament and abstraction but also exposed the colonial and patriarchal logics underpinning modernist aesthetics.

Erek re-enters this ideological terrain, transforming ornamentation from decorative surface into temporal, vibratory structure – one that organises space and perception. In his installations sound is not background but architecture itself – something built, inhabited, and experienced by bodies in motion. Here, ornamentation becomes a verb: it describes the act of tuning, of aligning oneself with surrounding frequencies. Through attention, the visitor becomes part of the composition. In this way, Erek’s installations dissolve the boundaries between composer and listener, architecture and inhabitant. More

Cevdet Erek was born in Istanbul in 1974, where he lives and works. He has developed site-specific installations and presented his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions, among others at Museumsquartier, Vienna; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Art Institute of Chicago; M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte
Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Pavilion of Turkey, 57th Venice Biennale; Spike Island, Bristol; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; 36th Bienal de São Paulo (both 2025); Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022); Gropius Bau, Berlin; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main; 5th Marrakech Biennale (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco;
dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Tate Modern, London.

Since 2008, Bettina Spörr is a curator at the Secession, where she engages in close collaboration with artists to conceptualise and realise exhibitions that explore the profound impact of contemporary art on society. Throughout her career, she has worked with numerous artists on solo exhibitions and, in 2010, curated the group show where do we go from here? at the Secession.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr

Departing from Duane Linklater’s exhibition mâcistan at Secession, on view through 15 February 2026, Julienne Lorz, Professor for Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and curator Haris Giannouras talk about the history and present of, and forms that have shaped institutional critique since the 1960s as well as the ways in which Linklater explores a new way of instituting.

Julienne Lorz is Professor for Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since October 2021, the new Master’s programme Expanded Museum Studies has been dedicated to examining, expanding and reorienting the concept of museum in all its facets. Previously she was Chief Curator at Gropius Bau in Berlin and a curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich, having curated and co-curated several international projects, monographic, and thematic group exhibitions including artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Joan Jonas, Laure Prouvost, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Haegue Yang.

Haris Giannouras works with artists to make exhibitions, artworks, publications and events. He is currently a curator at the Secession in Vienna. Before that he worked at MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt am Main and Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. Recent projects include work with Studio for Propositional Cinema, Cana Bilir-Meier, Atelier Bow-Wow, Andrea Büttner, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson, Onyeka Igwe, Hiwa K, Ghislaine Leung, Duane Linklater, Karī Mugo, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, and the Estate of Suzan Pitt.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producers: Jeanette Pacher & Bettina Spörr

Duane Linklater Supplies for the Soul

During the opening of Duane Linklater’s exhibition mâcistan on 28 November 2025, the performance Supplies for the Soul was acted out by three performers. Listen and enjoy the recording of this unique event.

Duane Linklater’s work and practice is grounded on an inspective inquiry on the foundations of institutions as they relate to the contemporary life and histories of Indigenous Peoples. His installations often employ paintings, sculptures, readymade objects, personal belongings, printed matter, images and symbols that he collects and accumulates. This process, linked to the concept of the cache – an enclosement, a safekeep – builds the core for a new body of work the artist presents in his exhibition at Secession.

During the opening a live act unfolded. Performed by a singer, a guitarist and a drum set, the new score, or musical soundtrack, titled Supplies for the Soul echoes sonic memories tethered to the multifarious histories of community and powerful tenderness of reclaiming agency, art and institutions.

Performers: Lili Ojeda, Matevž Počič, and Baj Gostič
Arrangement by Rahul Nair  

An event organised by the Secession Friends

Duane Linklater (born 1976) is Omaskêko Ininiwak from the Moose Cree First Nation. He lives and works in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. Linklater was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It's Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2018, Linklater installed pêyakotênaw—a public artwork comprising three large teepee sculptures—along the High Line in New York. He was the 2016 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Media Art, and the 2013 Sobey Art Award winner. In 2017, Linklater was awarded a public commission for the Don River Valley Park, Toronto in 2017.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Recording: Martin Laumann
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producers: Jeanette Pacher, Haris Giannouras

What can we truly know about ourselves and our histories in an age of hypervisibility, when algorithms and social structures alike decide not only what is seen but what is pushed into invisibility or irrelevance?

On the afternoon of 28 November 2025, Mimi Ọnụọha talked about her exhibition Soft Zeros; what she learned about collecting data and organizing it, about the Convict Leasing system and the impact is has had especially on Black lives in the USA, and about collective forgetting and denial over a 2-year research stretch and in the process of creating the new body of work that is presented in the exhibition.

Mimi Ọnụọha
Soft Zeros
29.11.2025 – 22.2.2026

In Soft Zeros, Mimi Ọnụọha examines the unreliability of archives and the instability of knowledge, exploring how absence and silence – shaped by algorithmic bias, historical denial, and collective forgetting – become meaningful. She points to what has not been collected, asked, allowed, or represented. More

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha’s work questions and exposes the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the seeming absences that define systems of labor, ecology and relations.

Ọnụọha’s work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art (NY, USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (CN), La Gaitê Lyrique (FR), Gropius Bau (DE), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and Atlanta Contemporary (GA, USA), among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by the Academy of Arts, Berlin (DE), the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (NY, USA), and Princeton University (NJ, USA). Her work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK). Ọnụọha is a Creative Capital and Fulbright–National Geographic grantee. She is also the co-founder of A People’s Guide to Tech, an artist-led organization that makes educational guides and workshops about emerging technology.

Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Vienna Secession since 2007. She is a regular lecturer in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and since 2023, a jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Jeanette Pacher

Nach einem gemeinsamen Besuch der Ausstellung „In & Out of Painting*“ im Belvedere 21 unterhalten sich Ashley Hans Scheirl und AntkeAntek Engel, Leiter*in des Instituts für Queer Theory in Berlin, unter anderem über Zusammenarbeit, Community, Queering- und Genderfragen, Verletzlichkeit, Bewegung und Wahrnehmung und über Archive. Viel Spaß beim Hören der neuen Folge.

Diese Folge wurde am 17. November 2025 in der Secession aufgenommen.

Ashley Hans Scheirl *1956 in Salzburg, lebt in Wien. Studium an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (Diplom 1980). Zwischen 1979 und 1998 entstanden über 50 Super8 Kurzfilme und zwei Langfilme. 1981–82 Aufenthalt in New York, von 1987 bis 2005 lebte Scheirl in London. 2003
M.A. Abschluss am Central St Martins College of Art & Design, London. 2006–2022 Professur für Kontextuelle Malerei an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, seit 2022 ebendort Senior Professor*in. 2006 Österreichisches Staatsstipendium für Bildende Kunst, 2012 Kunstpreis der Stadt Wien, 2019 Österreichischer Preis für Bildende Kunst des Bundeskanzleramts. 2022 repräsentierte Scheirl mit Jakob Lena Knebl Österreich bei der Venedig Biennale. 2025 Klocker Kunstpreis (zusammen mit Jakob Lena Knebl). Jüngste Einzelausstellungen: 2023 Palais de Tokyo, Paris; 2024 Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; 2025 Belvedere 21, Wien (alle mit Jakob Lena Knebl). www.ashleyhansscheirl.com/

AntkeAntek Engel (xi/xens; they/them) leitet das Institut für Queer Theory (iQt) in Berlin, das seit 2006 Projekte initiiert, in denen sich akademische und aktivistische, philosophische, politische und künstlerische Praxen verflechten. Engel hat 2001 an der Universität Potsdam in Philosophie promoviert und ist seitdem auf Gastprofessuren für Gender und Queer Studies sowie freiberuflich in Wissenschaft und Kulturproduktion tätig. Xi hat zahlreichen Bücher und Aufsätze zu queeren und feministischen Themen, zu politischer Philosophie, poststrukturalistischer Repräsentationskritik und queering visuelle Kultur veröffentlicht. 
 

Secession Podcast: Members ist eine Gesprächsreihe mit Mitgliedern der Secession.
Das Dorotheum ist exklusiver Sponsor des Secession Podcasts.
Programmiert vom Vorstand der Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye mit einem Ausschnitt aus Combat of dreams für Streichquartett und Zuspielung
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) von Alexander J. Eberhard.
Schnitt: Paul Macheck
Produktion: Jeanette Pacher