The so-called white dice is a seemingly “impartial” and “pure” house with plain-white partitions that’s supposed to make sure the undisturbed autonomy of artwork. The Hauptraum, the biggest gallery of Secession, is among the earliest and most consultant examples of it.
Like many artists who’ve exhibited right here, Yuki Okumura took its empty state as a departure level for his course of. However as a substitute of bringing works to this ideally suited backdrop to isolate artwork from the world, the artist conceived three site-specific initiatives to rediscover the house as a lived room interconnected with the world marked by its personal situations and contexts. For every undertaking, Okumura designed a playful process and requested individuals associated to the house to enact it.
Wilhelm as Hauptraum (2025) paperwork Okumura’s interview of Wilhelm “Willi” Montibeller, the previous head of Secession’s set up group who labored right here for greater than twenty years. Instructed by the artist, Willi personifies the house by saying “my identify is Hauptraum”, “I’m the house”, and so forth, but sharing his personal subjective recollections of among the exhibitions he arrange within the very house, in entrance of a miniature mannequin of it. The digicam focuses on his arms tracing within the air the types of works which might be absent within the scene but exist in his reminiscence.
For Secession’s Hive Thoughts(s) (2025), Okumura requested the board of Secession, consisting of artists and designers, to debate a attainable renaming of the Hauptraum, a reputation that connotes an undesirable hierarchy by actually which means “principal house”. Okumura then approached our press particular person Ramona “Mona” Heinlein (who’s me myself, in control of this very textual content co-edited by the artist) and had her translate a German transcript of the board’s assembly into English on their lonesome, verbally. In consequence, the speaker within the video appears to have a number of personalities, similar to how the board has many voices internally but speaks as one voice outwardly, mediated by the press workplace. In a nod to the “hive thoughts”, a sci-fi time period for collective consciousness, the monologue is accompanied by footage of beehives on the roof of Secession. A number of colonies of bees reside there, taken care of by one in all our present chief installers Hans Weinberger.
Coming into the exhibition, you first don’t see both video however solely hear Willi’s or Mona’s voice, as if the house had been speaking to you straight otherwise you had been within the head of its mastermind.
If these two initiatives narrate the biography of the house by analyzing its historic and institutional contexts, respectively, then Large White Empty Playground (2025) goals at tackling its persona by testing its bodily situations. Okumura invited those that recurrently or intensely work within the Hauptraum to take part on this undertaking. The members of Secession’s cleansing, schooling, safety and exhibition set-up employees attended a sequence of workshop classes carried out by Okumura that revolved round a chance-oriented, curiosity-driven, game-like technique for art-making that he has developed close to conceptual artwork, experimental music, and postmodern dance. Every particular person was inspired to conceive three units of easy directions for them to carry out “auto-active”, “counter-active”, and “inter-active” actions within the empty Hauptraum, utilizing solely their very own our bodies and issues available within the constructing. Each process is impressed by and interventional into sure materials elements of the house, based mostly on the particular person’s personal relation with it over time. Direct outcomes stay and represent Large White Playground, a bunch exhibition taking on the room nearly totally.
Updating institutional critique in human phrases, these initiatives discover how the situations and contexts of the Hauptraum have been, will be, and will probably be formed via private, interpersonal, and transpersonal forces. Or, it’s maybe the opposite approach round: because the artist states, it may be the house itself that makes use of us to disclose and renew its persona and biography, via every of our particular person our bodies and lives—situations and contexts—as a singular agent or translator.
Taking part artists of Large White Playground: Miriam Bachmann; Mario Batram; Paul Buschnegg; Stated Gärtner; golden salamturtle; Grzegorz Kielawski; Emine Koza; Niklas Hofstetter; Yuki Okumura; Flavio Palasciano; Alex Pasch; Cristina Rüesch; Sebastian Scholz; Paul Spendier; Johanna Steiner; Lorenz Sutter; Kai Philip Trausenegger; Hans Weinberger; Marit Wolters; Márton Zalka
Curated by Bettina Spörr
at Secession, Vienna
till Could 18, 2025
