Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud

On annotating, editing and making text in contemporary art

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud is an exhibition incorporating a programme of performance, readings and discursive 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 five months. Looking closely at the practice of annotating, editing and writing in art, the format considers text as a skeleton of artmaking, expanding its status beyond the preliminary note.

Artists employing text in their work are invited to use the exhibition as a space for production and experimentation. A display, specially-conceived by artist Ian Waelder in conversation with the artists, curator and institution, forms a setting ready for interaction, as well as a site for reference and meeting. In this scenario 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: Anahita Asadifar, Sanna Helena Berger, Lara Dâmaso, Joshua Leon, Ville Laurinkoski, Prosopopoeia, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Lisa Robertson, Shanzhai Lyric, Miriam Stoney, Ian Waelder und Eleanor Ivory Weber

Opening : 5.6.2025, 7 PM with a Performance by Ville Laurinkoski