Songs for the Changing Seasons

Songs for the Changing Seasons at Klima Biennale Wien
April 5–July 14, 2024 (Preview: April 4)

Songs for the Changing Seasons brings together artists whose works generate proposals and gestures of environmental attunement. By considering forms of love, attention, repair, humility and preparation, the artworks address where, when and how planetary transformation is experienced. 

Curated by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, Songs for the Changing Seasons  brings together artists whose works generate proposals and gestures of environmental attunement. By considering forms of love, attention, repair, humility and preparation, the artworks address where, when and how planetary transformation is experienced. 

Relying on the belief that the memory of the world is held by the world itself, the exhibition asks in what ways change is expressed through and with the bodies of humans, animals, plants and minerals; and how grief and pain—as well as hopes, dreams and desires—are experienced, processed and imagined on an individual and collective level. 

The curators considered seasonal change, transformation, and the preparations made by beings on Earth as seasons shift: gathering, storing, sleeping, moving, transforming, blossoming, regenerating, narrating, remembering, and beginning again. Knowing how environmental breakdown brings major transformations the show asks what songs, gestures, and stories art offers to the changing seasons.

Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio’s 12 Claws in Cloud Dust, is the architect’s first architectural/installation hybrid conceived for an outdoor space. Welcoming audiences onto the site, the structure’s fabric elements reproduce a number of insect species at risk of extinction.

Cooking Sections’s Salmon: Feed Chains is a sound installation that invites audiences to walk around in circles while experiencing it, thus reproducing the infinite, circular swim of farmed salmon, whose lives are confined to circular cages in waters they contribute to pollutinge.

Patricia Domínguez’s The Ballad of the Dry Sirens is an immersive video installation and mournful song created in collaboration with environmental activists Las Viudas del Agua and local communities in response to the humanitarian crisis provoked by the privatisation of water in Chile.

Eva Fàbregas’s soft sculptures create haptic visions and forms of sensorial encounters. Spread across the Nordwestbahnhof, her large, round and wrinkled forms modulate, appear and reappear throughout the whole exhibition space. 

Dominique Knowles’s large oil on canvas, Morning Pasture, takes viewers back and forth in time: traces of the first landscapes ever made relate to the post-anthropogenic lands of the currently deranged times. 

Enticing audiences into the exhibition space, in her new sound commission, vocalist Sofia Jernberg, experiments with unconventional techniques and sounds such as non-verbal vocalization, split tones, toneless singing and distortion.

Joan Jonas’s drawing installation, they came to us without a word II, is a  large series of blue fish drawings, celebrating these creatures while alluding to how oceans are being emptied out of the life they foster.

Lin May Saeed’s majestic carvings in polystyrene, Bee Relief II and Sea Dragon Relief depict the subjugation animals are exposed to while celebrating the movements towards their liberation of animals, thus creating a new iconography of interspecies solidarity.

Natalia Montoya’s first exhibited work outside of Chile and the outcome of a  residency in Vienna, brings together the Andean funerary breadmaking technique of the T’anta wawa (small decorated, human-like bread sculptures) with ancient mourning rituals of the alpine regions. 

Thao Nguyen Phan’s moving image Becoming Alluvium narrates the nature/cultural history of the Mekong River across recollections, legends, and representations, alongside a newly-commissioned large-scale architectural sculpture.

Studio Ossidiana works on materials, buildings, installations, and objects. The City of Birds combines interpretations of existing architectural models with proposals for new objects and spaces that consider the complex relationship people entertain with other animals, namely birds, and the importance of contextual, sentimental and aesthetic scales to mediate our relationship with the environment.

Laure Prouvost presents a large-scale wool tapestry Flying Mother (The Bird Ban Her) which connects flight, nurture, and an archetypal sensuousness. As bird migration routes are increasingly disrupted by the effects of anthropogenic climate change, the work  is infused with a sense of weightlessness and possibility, as well as a subtle melancholia. 

Adrián Villar Rojas’s first-ever comic book, The End of Imagination, reflects on the place and resonance of art at the end of a world. The comic is a sequel to and accompanies his film, also titled The End of Imagination, which combines webcam video footage from the Covid-19 pandemic, an echo of a historical period that marked a break in the fabric of time.

The first event of its kind, Klima Biennale Wien is directed by Claudius Schulze and Sithara Pathirana. The art direction of the Klima Biennale Wien 2024+2026 is held by artist and researcher Claudius Schulze.  For 100 days, the Biennale will bring together about 90 partner Institutions to focus and will host more than 20 exhibitions focusing on the potential of art, design, architecture, and science to imagine a sustainable and liveable future. The profound and sweeping changes in the Earth’s system necessitate a duly holistic debate. The Klima Biennale Wien faces the challenge of making the highly complex and acute issues of global change, the climate crisis, and the impacts on society tangible through the means of art.

Media enquiries and international press accreditation:
Nicola Jeffs, nj [​at​] nicolajeffs.com 

For more information, please visit the Klima Biennale Wien website.