Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud is an exhibition incorporating a programme of performance, readings, discussions and exchange with a focus on text in the field of contemporary art. Conceived as a group exhibition in progress, artworks installed at its inception will be in dialogue with numerous performative interventions taking place at and around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz over a course of four months. Looking closely at the practice of annotating, editing and writing in art, the format of the exhibition considers text as the framework for or ‘skeleton’ of artmaking – expanding its status beyond the preliminary note. The exhibition serves as a page upon which artworks and performances are inscribed as interrelated notes – sampling, (mis)quoting and rehearsing themselves and one another.

Artists employing text in their work have been invited to use the exhibition as a space for production and experimentation. A display that artist Ian Waelder conceived in conversation with the artists, curator and institution, forms a setting ready for interaction, as well as a site for reference and meeting that quite literally punctuates the space.

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud brought together works by Anahita Asadifar, Sanna Helena Berger, Lara Dâmaso, Joshua Leon, Ville Laurinkoski, Prosopopoeia, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Lisa Robertson, Shanzhai Lyric, Miriam Stoney, Ian Waelder and Eleanor Ivory Weber.

kunsthallewien.at/en/exhibition/burn-the-diaries-read-them-out-loud

Important note: Kunsthalle Wien canceled a workshop by artists Anahita Asadifar and Sam Dolbear that curator Gina Merz invited them to facilitate in September 2025 as part of the exhibition. The workshop was planned on Walter Benjamin and politically engaged art, citing unforeseen staffing shortages after the artists repeatedly requested written clarity on whether and how they could address current political issues, including criticism of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, regional military violence, Western arms exports, state repression, the defamation of non- and anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians, and criticism of capitalism and ongoing genocides elsewhere.