Now in its seventeenth edition, curated by remains a staple of Vienna’s autumn art calendar, running this year alongside newcomer Astoria Artshow. Since 2009, the festival has invited international curators to collaborate with local galleries around a shared thesis. This year, co-directors Attilia Fattori Franchini and Christina Linher chose LOVE—a deceptively simple concept at a time marked by conflict, polarization, and social fragmentation, one that inevitably prompts harder questions of solidarity, duty, and collective responsibility. The most compelling exhibitions in the program treat it not as sentiment but as a problem to work through.
The festival takes American poet Ariana Reines’s commissioned essay “On Love” as its point of departure. Drawing on Rumi, James Schuyler, and the troubadours, Reines diagnoses a contemporary “spiritual squalor” in which love no longer structures society, countering it with Simone Weil’s claim that attention is a form of generosity. Across three standout exhibitions, that attention becomes visible as labor: stewardship, domestic service, and artistic transmission.
At Croy Nielsen, curator Milan Ther examines an artist’s legacy without letting biography dictate its reading. The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams focuses on Swedish artist Lenke Rothman (1929-2008), building on a retrospective Ther organized at Kunstverein Hamburg earlier this year. Rothman survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen as a teenager before settling in Sweden in 1945, but grew tired of being expected, as Ther noted, to “lend body to the experiences of the Holocaust”—prompting her turn toward abstraction. Spanning six decades, the show gathers drawings, watercolors, acrylic boxes, and assemblages built from buttons, safety pins, tickets, and clothing, treating stitching and thread as both healing process and act of mending. In Hud/Lien (1982), a newsclipping featuring a sample of Marilyn Monroe's bedsheet is layered with faux leopard fur and a taxonomic illustration; in Talisman Fetischer mot onda ögat (1984), fabric, feathers, and wire form what Ther calls “little autonomous bodies,” objects made to ward off evil. Ther resists the familiar logic of recovery, in which restoring an overlooked artist can become another form of enclosure—a restraint reinforced when he hosted a public dialogue with Rothman’s son, Elias Arnér, extending stewardship beyond the gallery walls.
At Shore, Amalia Ulman shifts care into the domestic sphere with BABYBUBU NEVER DIE, opening with a letter to her rescue dog: “To love an animal is to admit defeat and welcome heartbreak with open arms... I became your servant.” Around this premise she gathers artists probing attachment and dependency—Alexandr Hackenschmied and Maya Deren, Judith Hopf, Gretchen Lawrence and Margaret Tashkova, Zoë Lund, Libby Rothfeld, Bruno Zhu, Jennifer Moon and Laub. Hopf and Ulman share a gallery, and in a recorded conversation, Ulman described Hopf’s sculptural work as an extension of the artist’s own body rather than a detached object—an affinity she traced partly to Hopf’s childhood spent riding horses. Most striking are photographs from the archive of the late Zoë Lund, whose two pet rats multiplied into a colony of over a hundred; feeling it a shame for them to spend nights “in jail,” she let them roam freely, and the resulting images show rats scattered across counters and climbing over Lund herself. The cared-for have reorganized the space around them—Ulman’s “servant” is not one who offers affection, but one whose life is rearranged by another’s demands.
At FELIX GAUDLITZ, Jason Dodge explores affection stripped of utility in What can I do now with this great useless machine of my love? It has no wholesome work to do—a title contributed by artist James Richards as his sole work in the show. Dodge roots the exhibition in a knife mark behind the ear of a carved Roman head in Berlin, an errant trace of its maker’s hand, then invites participating artists to perform one another’s work as active transmission rather than mimicry, borrowing Ilya Kaminsky’s idea that translation should open windows, not build mirrors. On opening night, Dodge hosted a Sudden Wealth concert with Chris Evans, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, and Graham Kelly, during which he read poetry by Alice Notley, whose language also frames the exhibition text. The reading dwelt on the body's memory of movement, carried through Dodge's seductive, seemingly improvised delivery alongside the music—the performance itself enacting the show’s interest in carrying another author’s work without duplicating it. Iman Issa contributes Dancer, (study for 2014), pairing lenticular prints with spare text; Lydia Ourahmane’s contribution is a rumor she invented and set loose in the show’s circulation, existing only by being retold. Both echo Dodge’s premise of transmission over replication. The clearest expression is Rosemary Mayer’s re-activated balloon installation Connections (Vienna) (1978/2026), based on an unrealized 1978 proposal: every artist and contributor dedicated a balloon to another artist important to them, paired with a date, from which the Estate of Rosemary Mayer selected a flower and a constellation visible over Vienna. Dodge to Anne Truitt, Ourahmane to a man who told her he loved her weeks before the opening, Issa to a friend she met over a decade ago—each balloon an ephemeral monument built from someone else’s memory of someone else.
Across all three shows, love is stripped of easy sentimentality, surfacing instead as curatorial debt, domestic surrender, and the generative act of carrying another’s work. What unites them is not affection as mood but attention as ongoing obligation—prompting the question of what labor we value once productivity stops being the standard.
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Jennifer Teets is a Texan born, Paris-based curator, writer, and editor. Her edited volumes include Electric Brine (Archive Books, 2021) and Intimate confession is a project (Inventory Press, 2024), and she is currently co-editing a twenty-year survey of writings by Lithuanian artist Darius Mikšys with Audrius Pocius, forthcoming. She periodically writes for ArtReview, e-flux Criticism, Artforum, Mousse, Spike, and Topical Cream, among others.
