You dissolve / It’s just another way you exist
Die Angewandte at Vienna Contemporary 2025
Dissolution is not disappearance but a shifting,
a dispersal, a survival in other forms. This exhibition gathers three artists, all graduates of the TransArts department,
whose works thematically explore the unstable space between presence and absence, remembering and erasure, materiality and
transformation, asking us to look closely at what dissolves but does not end, and to see how traces endure in language, in
space, and in form.
In Range 2C00-2C5F, Mariia
Mihdieieva revives a forgotten script, transforming the Glagolitic alphabet into a new typeface that slips between
code and communication. Her work confronts the politics of legibility—who can be read, who remains invisible—and reclaims
space for voices at risk of dissolving into silence.
Maja Bojanić’s Yours is the world
in which I move uninvited traces the warmth of a body removed from the record books but not from memory. Through an infrared
lens, the absent figure of her great-grandmother, who was legally erased in 1992 during a state-sponsored deletion of thousands
of Slovenian residents from the permanent residency records, remains as a ghostly rhythm of life: as a residue of touch, breath
and movement that refuses to disappear.
In eternal 24/7, Katharina Birkmann turns
to the fragile figure of the snowman, a temporary being perpetually collapsing into water. Between play and disappearance,
ecology and culture, the snowman becomes a fragile monument—an emblem of how we mourn endings yet still strive to hold them
in place.
Read together, these three practices articulate dissolution as a generative condition. Whether
through scripts, bureaucratic erasures, or ephemeral figures, the works are to be understood as a rejection of finality; they
emphatically convey that what dissolves also has permanence.
The exhibition title
quotes the first line of the song You Dissolve, from the album Now We Can See by The Termals, 2009.
