IZK Institute for Contemporary Art

🔸WE ARE HIRING

We are seeking two independent artist-researchers with an interest in artistic research, contemporary art practice, and transdisciplinary methods who will collaboratively develop their work within the framework of the institute’s research priorities.

🔹 Apply via the respective links in our bio

🔹 WE ARE HIRING

We are seeking two independent artist-researchers with an interest in artistic research, contemporary art practice, and transdisciplinary methods who will collaboratively develop their work within the framework of the institute’s research priorities.

🔸 Apply via the respective links in our bio

✨ Documentation from the final Assembly! within the course, Assembly! Towards an Infrastructural Commons, led by Rose-Anne Gush and Olia Sosnovskaya

Students have worked with the Assembly as a form of collaborative learning, artistic mediation and knowledge production - while exploring subjugated histories of partisan struggle against N**i fascism on the Austrian - Slovenian borderlands; Muzej/Museum Peršman; the question of witnessing; notions and figures of liberation ecology; the role of the home in its ambivalent meanings of safety and entrapment; and the complexity of the landscape as archive.

Congratulations to all students: Louise Dahlweid, Helena Fernsebner, Samuel Gruber, Rebekka Hiemesch, Leila Jahić, Chiara Reisinger, Matthias Schröck, Lukas Seliger, Bojana Sikanic, Dehli Stach, Anna Störzinger, Mara Tolpeit.

Special thanks to our guest jury: Budour Khalil (IZK TU Graz), Rojda Tuğrul (Independent Artist), Philipp Sattler (PhD Candidate, Royal College of Art, London), Markus Gönitzer (Muzej/Museum Peršman), Katrin Nahidi (Art History, University of Graz)

Finding the Shape Described by an Absence

IZK at Graz Open Architecture

June 26, 2026

Congratulations to all students for completing the semester, that was our Sommerfest ✨

Photos: © IZK

IZK LECTURE SERIES
SUMMER 2026

We are excited to announce the second lecture in this semester’s IZK Lecture Series by Sofia Bempeza!
Learning from Rivers and Mountains - On Storytelling and Intersectional Art Pedagogies

Prof. Dr. phil. Sofia Bempeza is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, theorist, researcher, and a poet (She-Dandy).
Her* work is focused on the politics of dissent, queer-feminist art and knowledge practices, storytelling and decolonial educational practices. Her* theoretical and artistic research concerns the history of art strike(s), polyphonic aesthetics, the cultural strategies of the far right and the anti-gender narratives. She* publishes poetry, theory, and critical fabulation in multilingual magazines/editions, and has been working in collaborations within groups and art collectives in Athens, Berlin, Zürich, and Turkiye. Together with Prof.
Dr. Annette Krauss, Sofia Bempeza co-heads the Department Art and Communication Practices at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

8 June 2026, 18.00
HALLE, Kronesgasse 5/1, 8010 Graz
All welcome!

✨ CALL FOR PAPERS ✨

Metabolic Commons: Against Entropic Zones and the Ecology That War Built

Feminist political ecology workshop: call for papers

September 21–22, 2026
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Sestiere Dorsoduro, 3246
Venice 30123
Italy

Organized by the Radical Epistemologies: Political Ecology and Transversal Praxis research cluster at NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with IZK—Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology, and HealthXCross ERC at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Curated by Rose-Anne Gush (Graz University of Technology) and Antonia Majaca (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).

We are delighted to share documentation from the presentation by the Structural Decay Research Group members Anđela Marinković, Dora Živadinov and Marija Jančić, who revisited their 2025 performance, developed within the IZK Specialization module “Memory is the Struggle for Justice in the Present”, a public intervention staged at Freiheitsplatz in Graz. The performance was framed as a field investigation into the claim of a melting bronze monument. Passersby were invited to participate and collectively produce knowledge around the authority of monuments in public space today, proposing speculation as a tool to question their permanence and meaning. In this presentation, the artists presented the project as both performance and research practice, reflecting on the experience of working in the archive as one that enables reinterpretation and opens space for multidirectional perspectives.

Thank you to all the students who joined us!

IZK LECTURE SERIES
SUMMER 2026

We are excited to announce the second lecture in this semester’s IZK Lecture Series by Sofia Bempeza!

Learning from Rivers and Mountains – On Storytelling and Intersectional Art Pedagogies

Prof. Dr. phil. Sofia Bempeza is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, theorist, researcher, and a poet (She-Dandy). Her* work is focused on the politics of dissent, queer-feminist art and knowledge practices, storytelling and decolonial educational practices. Her* theoretical and artistic research concerns the history of art strike(s), polyphonic aesthetics, the cultural strategies of the far right and the anti-gender narratives. She* publishes poetry, theory, and critical fabulation in multilingual magazines/editions, and has been working in collaborations within groups and art collectives in Athens, Berlin, Zürich, and Turkiye. Sofia Bempeza co-heads the Department Art and Communication Practices together with Prof. Dr. Annette Krauss. 

8 June 2026, 18.00
HALLE, Kronesgasse 5/1, 8010 Graz
All welcome!

We are happy to share some impressions from the book presentation of Artistic Labour of the Body (Brill, 2026) by Rose-Anne Gush, organized in collaboration with Depot Wien. The presentation featured contributions by Alexi Kukuljevic, Jenni Tischer, and Sophia Rohwetter alongside Rose-Anne Gush.

Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labour. By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond “innocence”. Gush demonstrates how their art critiqued postwar Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of N**ism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes postwar artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.

Thank you to Depot, and everyone who joined us for the evening and discussion!

A PRESENTATION FOR ARTISTIC PRACTICE 1

11 May 2026, 18.00
HALLE, Kronesgasse 5/1, 8010 Graz
All welcome!

Anđela Marinković
Dora Živadinov
Marija Jančić

The Structural Decay Research Group members revisit their 2025 performance, developed within the IZK Specialization module “Memory is the Struggle for Justice in the Present”, a public intervention staged at Freiheitsplatz in Graz. The performance was framed as a field investigation into the claim of a melting bronze monument. Passersby were invited to participate and collectively produce knowledge around the authority of monuments in public space today, proposing speculation as a tool to question their permanence and meaning. In this presentation, the artists will present the project as both performance and research practice, reflecting on the experience of working in the archive as one that enables reinterpretation and opens space for multidirectional perspectives.