Your exhibition centers around topics of temporary inhabitance, belonging and the concept of home. How do horses, cats and canaries fit in there?
The horses of Vienna is characterizing the feeling and the history of the city in so many ways. First of all, we have the Spanish riding school with the famous Lippizaner horses, next to them we have the Wurstelstand selling sausages with pferde-leberkäse and if you look back in time to literature during the world wars, we can find a female writer Kay Boyle sending out ”The white horses of Vienna” in 1935 (!!!) – she even won the O. Henry Award for it same year (!!!). And the book is basically about sharing a home with someone who has different roots or beliefs than yourself, Boyle observing rising nazism and antisemitism during her time in Austria.

This thing about sharing different roots, reminds me of a great quote I heard the other day, it was a theater director from Rwanda (invited to the WWIII conference organized by Kader Attia here in Vienna, collaboration between Burgtheater and Kunsthalle Wien), who said ”I’m always torned about my roots, but I’m not a tree. I have feet and I walk. And I say to those, who think about double culture, that I have one culture. Mine. Contemporary. I do not have a double culture. I am not a zebra.” I think this was a great quote, and in general this man really moved me with his story and his words, and made me realize that if I wanna do an exhibition about home and temporality, I need to understand the past of my own home, that is Denmark, and I therefore decided to include works of Danish artists dealing with colonial history in the Carribeans.

Despite the fact that human beings are not trees and not zebras, I believe that we are all more connected to the zebras, the trees and the horses, than we sometimes are aware of. This is called biodiversity. We depend on each other. And time is running out. Therefore I wanted to make an exhibition about imaginary time or, in invisible time, or a different visualisation of time travelling at least.

So back to the horses: Last year I was travelling through Vienna in the middle of the Ibiza gate. Surrounding myself with mostly the ”creative class”, it seemed like a revolutionary fiesta, singing Vengaboys in the streets, everyone was so happy that FINALLY something would change. So the primeminister stepped back and they got their election, and then half a year later, I asked my friends from here: What happened then? Any changes? And the horses came up. Because there’s been a big discussion about police horses, what they resemble, why they are important and what seems to concern the most, how much do they cost… After all, the policehorses (I think we’re talking about 14 horses maximum, but who counts) were fired and therefore again ”on the market”, looking for a new home. (It’s funny because in Denmark we’re somehow searching for new policehorses, because our right wing party really wants them back in the streets, but so far we haven’t found any that are good enough. I guess it’s also a question of race, adaption ability etc….). What seems like a smaller consequence of the Ibiza-fuelled election, actually means no home for somebody. In this case the horses. And also, who told them to be policehorses in the first place? This discussion of course pays an arthistorical hommage to Tania Bruguerra’s Taitlin’s Whisperer performance with the police horses at the Tate Modern, but is in general a question of how we talk about and interact with horses. In English, when you make a mistake, you say: Just get back in the saddle, meaning like try again, better luck next time… Again, mentioning time, when is next time? Will there be a next time? I doubt it, we’re running out of time! But talking about horses, in German, you call your best friend someone to steal horses with. Am I the only one who wonders how many people Mr. Kurz is stealing horses with at the moment? Talking about him, he started the year, 2020, out by saying: ”I believe, we can protect both the climate and the borders”. And I was really wondering what he meant… The climate crisis is a threat and a reality beyond borders, and if we shall have any chance of surviving this, we NEED to think less walls, more bridges, therefore I’m happy to include a couple of artworks in the show concerned with building bricks, one is made out of Haribo gummybears, you see, the bears, we also have to remember them in this game, it’s not just about zebras, tress, humans, horses, cats and canaries, it’s also about gummybears!

But if you wanna know about the cats, except that they also resemble the anthropocene human-dominant gaze on a species that we have domesticated into the extreme, I’m also refering to three other kinds of cats, very specifically: Schrødingers cat (a quantum mechanical thought experiment where the cat is both dead and alive at the same time), Cat’s Craddle in the sense of Donna Haraway’s Playing stringfigures with companionspecies and Cat’s Craddle as in the title of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 sci-fi novel about man’s relationship to technology and nuclear power. We’ll read about all three in the reading circle, please feel free to join!