Secession Podcast

“Something that [my mum] taught me was this verse in the New Testament, ‘(pppppppp)pray without ceasing’, and I really hold on to that verse. It is a guide for me because that’s how I think about this calendar. I can always be (ofofofofofof)offering a prayer or a reflection of honor (tt)to an Ancestor, no matter what day it is.” (JJJJJerome Ellis in a conversation with Christine Sun Kim published in the accompanying book - free download here)

JJJJJerome Ellis
An unfinished calendar
that commemorates slaves
escaping their enslavers, 1673–1886
11.9. – 22.11.2026

Multimedia artist, musician, composer, poet, and performer JJJJJerome Ellis explores the intersections of Blackness, music, spirituality, and non-normative speech, creating spaces for healing and communion. In this exhibition, they have filled the walls with calendrical lists on paper, executed in charcoal and adorned with flowers drawn in oil pastel. With one sheet for each day and month, the work spans the entire duration of the exhibition. The lists record the names of enslaved people who liberated themselves in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, together with the dates and places of their escapes. Throughout the space, a recording of the artist’s voice describes the installation and reads aloud the names assigned to each day. As the first-floor gallery is not accessible by lift, duplicates of the pages are available so that visitors can touch and encounter them at close range. More

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice. JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!

Bettina Spörr is an art historian and has been a curator at the Secession since 2008. During this time, she has developed more than 60 solo exhibitions in close collaboration with artists and collectives of all generations and from across the globe, including exhibitions with Laura Owens, Francis Alÿs, Nicole Eisenman, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carlos Bunga, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Delaine Le Bas, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Francis Offman, June Crespo, Marianna Simnett, Katherine Hubbard, and JJJJJerome Ellis.

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

Curator Haris Giannouras reads a letter addressed to the artist Lap-See Lam. The artist reads her response which was written following the opening of her exhibition 192 Wing Lok Street at Secession. Their exchange is scored by parts of the sound work included in the exhibition composed by Linus Hillborg & Marlena Salonen.

Lap-See Lam
192 Wing Lok Street
11.9. – 22.11.2026

Lap-See Lam currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Lam’s work traverses diverse genres and disciplines, from video installation to live performance, blending contemporary technology with traditional references and methods. Lam was the recipient of the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award 2025 and represented Sweden at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.

In 2021, she was awarded the Dagens Nyheter Culture Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden (2026); PHI Foundation, Montreal; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (all in 2025); The Power Plant, Toronto, and Studio Voltaire, London (both in 2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Swiss Institute, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; and Lidköping Konsthall, Lidköping (all in 2023); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2022, 2018); Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim (2021); and Moderna Museet Malmö (2018–2019).

Lam has participated in group exhibitions at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2026); Ghost 2565, Bangkok (2022); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (2021); Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2020); Performa 19, New York (2019); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2019); Luleå Biennial, Luleå (2018); Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, Kópavogur (2018); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017).

Haris Giannouras works closely with artists to make exhibitions, artworks, publications, and events. He is currently working at the Secession in Vienna. Before that he was working at MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt, where he contributed to the exhibition There is no there there, a large-scale survey dedicated to artists with refugee, exile, and migration backgrounds who lived and worked in divided Germany from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Prior to that, he worked at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, where he co-curated exhibitions and produced publications with Hiwa K, Ghislaine Leung, and Studio for Propositional Cinema. Recent projects include work with Cana Bilir-Meier, Atelier Bow-Wow, Andrea Büttner, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson, Onyeka Igwe, Duane Linklater, Reba Maybury, Mire Lee, and Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, and the Estate of Suzan Pitt. Haris Giannouras is currently pursuing a doctorate dissertation researching quoting and discursivity in painting after 1990.

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
Soundtrack: recorded in the exhibition space, with music by Linus Hillborg and Marlena Salonen
Executive Producer: Haris Giannouras, Bettina Spörr

Marianna Simnett shares insights into her conceptual thinking and the creative process behind her exhibition Circus at the Secession, a multimedia exhibition that brought together light, sound, and sculptural works drawing on her Yugoslav heritage. This episode was recorded on 6 March 2026, the day after the opening.

Marianna Simnett
Circus
6.3. – 31.5.2026

Personal references, including a work that was inspired by her Jewish-Croatian grandfather’s experience during the Holocaust, intersect with nods to folkloric bogeywomen, who may interchangeably figure as threat or ally, and the traditional Balkan skirt that stages the delicate play of revealing and concealing intimate body parts. The show’s Circus theme manifests itself in a variety of ways throughout the presentation: in the maniacal spinning of a skirt overhead, alluding to a circus tent; in a stage for a performance; in the sound of torturous laughter; or in dazzling lights illuminating a darkened space.

Simnett’s practice consistently engages with intense corporeal states – urinating, fainting, the sensation of being tickled – which she taps into in an investigation of pleasure and pain. Having grown up in Great Britain as the daughter of a Croatian mother during the Yugoslav Wars, the artist remembers a recurring fantasy of a urinating figure resembling a folkloric female character who lifts her skirt to expose her genitalia to ward off evil spirits. Translated into neon lighting, this figure oscillates between provocation and defence, between abjection and agency. Neon does not merely illuminate; it intrudes. It screams, demands attention, and collapses distance. Building on the legacy of Bruce Nauman’s neon works, light in Simnett’s Fountain (2026) becomes a body in its own right – one that addresses, agitates, and physically affects the viewer. More

Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) is a British-Croatian multidisciplinary artist living and working between Berlin and New York. Her immersive narratives centre around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care.

Simnett’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Secession, Vienna (2026); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl (2026); Société, Berlin (2025, 2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2024); LAS, Berlin (2023); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Kunsthalle Zürich (2019); MMK, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018); The New Museum, New York (2018) and Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022); Espressioni: The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); and Prize of the Böttcherstraße, Kunsthalle Bremen (2022).

Bettina Spörr is an art historian and has been a curator at the Secession since 2008. During this time, she has developed more than 60 solo exhibitions in close collaboration with artists and collectives of all generations and from across the globe, including exhibitions with Laura Owens, Francis Alÿs, Nicole Eisenman, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carlos Bunga, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Delaine Le Bas, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Francis Offman, June Crespo, Marianna Simnett, and Katherine Hubbard. 

Programmed by the board of the Secession.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

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

Artists Katherine Hubbard and Sophie Thun explore how Hubbard's work is positioned within queer feminist art and critically engages with the tradition of analogue photography. The conversation was recorded during the installation of the exhibition on 7 June 2026.

Katherine Hubbard
The Great Room
12.6. – 30.8.2026

How do you capture the inner life of a person whose reality no longer aligns with the outer world? And how do you remain in relation to someone who is both intimately familiar and irreversibly changing?

Katherine Hubbard began her five-year project The Great Room in 2020, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when her mother, Antonette Berger, became increasingly unwell and the artist became her primary caretaker. It took several months in a time of anxiety and isolation until Berger was diagnosed with LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy), a form of dementia. Hubbard has described this diagnosis as both necessary and insufficient: a gesture towards control and classification that ultimately fails to grasp the lived, shifting reality of her mother’s condition. It is precisely this gap that the project inhabits. More

Katherine Hubbard (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1981) considers analog photography as a mimesis of the body and asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs the positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time-based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, harnessing the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking. Hubbard is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in photography and received her MFA in 2010 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is Associate Professor and MFA Photography Program Director at Pratt Institute, School of Art in Brooklyn, NY.

Solo exhibitions include The great room, Company Gallery, New York (2023); Avoid glancing blows, Company Gallery, New York (2020); Katherine Hubbard, Higher Pictures, New York (2018); stages, Baxter St. Camera Club of New York, New York (2017); and Bring your own lights, The Kitchen, New York (2016). Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including Time Management Techniques, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Ecstatic Land, Marfa Ballroom, Texas; A Collection of Slow Events, The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; The Artist’s Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1. Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is included as part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sophie Thun (*1985, lives and works in Vienna) works primarily with analogue photography techniques, their spaces, processes and production and exhibition conditions. Thun grew up in Warsaw and completed her master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in both Vienna and Krakow. Thun has been a member of the board of the Secession since 2021, where she had a solo exhibition in 2020; from 2023 to 2025 she was interim professor of the photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since 2026, she has been Professor of Artistic Photography at the Institute of Fine Arts and Media Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

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

British-Nigerian artist, filmmaker, and researcher Onyeka Igwe talks with curator Jeanette Pacher about her project No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame (2024/26) that lends its title also to her solo show; her interest in sound, especially protest songs, and her love for sacred harp singing, filming in the abandoned Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos, and her iterative practice. Their conversation was recorded on 11 June 2026 at the Secession.

Onyeka Igwe
No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame
12.6. – 30.8.2026

In the exhibition, two video works unfold in close relation to one another. The film traces the afterlives of British colonialism in Nigeria through the abandoned site of the former Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos – once a key outpost of the Colonial Film Unit’s propaganda apparatus. Today, the building stands in disrepair. The images once housed there are difficult to access – not only due to their material degradation, but also because of a broader reluctance to confront what they contain. Presented on the window front, the moving image blends with the institution’s architecture and urban surroundings, situating its sonic and visual field within the specific conditions of its display. More

Onyeka Igwe is a London-born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka's practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound.

Solo exhibitions include our generous mother, Tate Britain (2025), history is a living weapon in yr hand, Bonington Gallery and Peer, UK (2024), A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), The Miracle on George Green, The High Line, New York, USA (2022), a so-called archive, LUX, London, UK and THE REAL STORY IS WHAT'S IN THAT ROOM, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada (2021), and Corrections, with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada (2018).

Onyeka jointly received the 2025 Film London Jarman Award, was awarded the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize (2021), Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film (2020) and was the recipient of the Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019. Her video works are screened at film festivals internationally.

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, member of the BIG ART advisory board, and from 2023 to 2025, she was jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna.

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