From 5 November 2025, the Angewandte will be showing key works by the artist
in ‘Thinking Through Weibel’ and opening up space for discourse. A joint exhibition by the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
with Art Collection and Archive and the AIL (Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab).
Thinking
Through Weibel brings together key works from the Peter Weibel Archive at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and places
them in dynamic dialogue with works by international contemporary artists. The works by Morehshin Allahyari, Nancy Baker Cahill,
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jakob Lena Knebl, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Thania Petersen, and Eva Schlegel are characterised by different
conceptual and material approaches. Their contributions do not strictly follow the logic of Peter Weibel's oeuvre; rather,
they position themselves transversally to it, forming intersections and connections without establishing fixed relationships.
The focus is on the early years of the artist Peter Weibel (1944–2023), in which sculptural investigations merge with performance,
film and written language. This creative phase reveals a restless movement between media, driven by the desire to explore
the limits of perception and break down disciplinary boundaries.
Curated by Valerie Messini and Brooklyn J. Pakathi,
the exhibition is a collaboration between the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures with Art Collection and Archive and the
AIL – Applied Interdisciplinary Lab at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It highlights the intertwining of politics,
sexuality and playfulness that animate Weibel's experiments. His performative actions, text works and spatial concepts are
juxtaposed with the works of the participating artists. These juxtapositions are not structured as reflections or responses,
but rather enable a series of overlapping gestures and deviations that show that creative freedom is inextricably linked to
socio-political conditions.
Thinking Through Weibel sees itself as both an encounter and a deviation—a starting
point for new perspectives: an attempt to engage with the experimental impulses that shaped Weibel's creative and intellectual
life in order to open up new perspectives beyond these impulses. The exhibition offers an examination of Weibel's practice—his
working methods and understanding of materiality, medium, technology, and form—as a way of grasping the contours of his diverse
oeuvre. At the same time, the exhibition calls for a questioning of the epistemological structures that conditioned the interventions:
to overcome the Western epistemological frameworks that shaped Weibel's work and, at the same time, to think differently about
traditions, practices and intellectual paths.
Thinking Through Weibel invites us to view Weibel's oeuvre not
as a closed legacy, but as a space for exploration and openness in artistic thinking that opens up beyond and against imposed
boundaries.
About Peter Weibel:
Peter Weibel (5 March 1944, Odessa–1 March 2023, Karlsruhe)
was an Austrian artist, curator and art and media theorist. He became internationally known primarily as director of the ZKM
(Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe), which he headed from 1999 to 2023 and turned into a globally influential laboratory
for the connection of art, science and society. After donating a large part of his archive to the University of Applied Arts
Vienna in 2017, the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures was founded, with Weibel as its founding director. Although Weibel
mostly lived elsewhere, he remained a prominent Viennese personality – interwoven with the culture and memory of the city.
He studied in Vienna from 1964 onwards, took part in the famous ‘Art and Revolution’ action at the University of Vienna in
1968, and from 1976 onwards taught at several institutions, including the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he was
appointed professor of visual media design in 1984. Between 1968 and 2014, he showed his work in numerous exhibitions, founded
the Hotel Morphila Orchestra, and curated the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale several times. Part of his work is
preserved in the Weibel Archive at the Art Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Opening:
5 November 2025, 6 p.m. | Duration: 6 November 2025 – 8 January 2026
University of Applied Arts Vienna
AIL, Angewandte
Interdisciplinary Lab, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Free admission.
Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Artists:
Morehshin Allahyari, Nancy Baker Cahill, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jakob Lena Knebl, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Thania Petersen, Eva
Schlegel, and Peter Weibel.
Curators: Valerie Messini and Brooklyn J. Pakathi
More details: https://ail.angewandte.at/program/thinking-through-weibel
