Red threads, loose ends, another sculpture is possible

How to make, talk about and interpret contemporary sculpture, and how to grasp the complexity of its material, situational, spatial and thematic relationships, are often only the starting points for the many discussions that take place within the context of each studio at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The event was created in an attempt to draw together some of these discursive threads and open them up not only within the structures of the Academy, but also to a wider audience. Each of the speakers has been invited by a different studio and its team, thus emphasising the variety of positions.

Program

11 h
Enrico David
Invited by the studio of Art and Space | Object, Prof. Julian Göthe

The multifaceted artistic practice of Enrico David (b. 1966, Ancona, Italy) reflects the artist’s sustained inquiry into the anthropoidal form and the expressive potential of material. Over three decades, David has realised a body of work that explores translations and transformations of the body, identity and persona. Interdisciplinary in nature, his practice converses with the language of dramatisation and theatre, drawing on sources that range from visual fragments to literary and filmic references to personal memory, while gesturing toward the applied arts through an exploratory approach to material and form. “The modern, the archaic, the ontological appear to me as the great conductors through which we seek to plan and make our tiny, insignificant temporality function. We try to find order in everything we are left to imagine, moving blindly within what we consider might embody a sense of hope. Imagination is the springboard that launches us beyond the inappropriate use of conventions, towards unlikely harmonies, new forms of beauty. Who can ever know?”
His work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including I Am Back Tomorrow at Castello di Rivoli (2025), The Soul Drains the Hand at White Cube Paris (2025), Destroyed Men Come and Go at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2023), and the major museum surveys Gradations of Slow Release at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2019) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018).

13 h 
Agnes Meyer-Brandis
Invited by the studio Art and Intervention | Environment, Prof. Judith Huemer

Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE) is a Berlin-based artist with a background in sculpture and new media. She creates works on the fringes of science, technology, fiction and imagination. Educated first in mineralogy, followed by studies at the art academies in Maastricht, Düsseldorf and media art Cologne, she has founded the Research Raft FFUR, a fictitious “Institute for Art & Subjective Science” that purposefully ‘is asking questions but gives no answers’ in fields such as climate research, environmental studies, meteorology, as well as synthetic and artistic biology. Meyer-Brandis’ work has been exhibited worldwide and awarded with many prizes, including two Prix Ars Electronica Awards of Distinction & the European Kairos prize. 

14 h 
Open Kitchen 
Lunch event by Wood & Ceramics

During the summer semester of 2026, the “Laube” in the courtyard of Kurzbauergasse was restored and renovated as part of the “Wood 2” course. In addition, a mobile kitchen was built and installed there. This kitchen is intended to facilitate shared activities, events, or informal get-togethers in the courtyard at the academy. It is, therefore, a place and a tool for creating, strengthening, and maintaining community.
That’s why it’s wonderful to put it to use for the Sculpture Symposium’s lunch and serve minestrone. The event will take place outside in the courtyard if the weather is nice. In case of bad weather, it can easily be moved indoors, since the kitchen is mobile.

15:30  h
Iris Touliatou
Invited by the studio Art and Space | Spatial Strategies, Prof. Iman Issa

Through subtle redistributions of objects, economies, human relationships and production processes, Iris Touliatou (b. Athens, Greece) explores the relationships between social structures and people’s practices and raises questions on the conditions of artistic production and the institutional frames within which it exists. 
She recently had solo exhibitions at MMXX, Milan (2026); Kunstverein München, Munich (2025); National Hellenic Research Foundation / NEON City project, Athens (2024); Peer, London; ­fluent, Santander; Kunst­halle Basel, Basel (2023); and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2022). 
Often responsive to the place and context of their exhibition, her works examine infrastructures, affect and entanglements in an intimate and systemic level, without foreclosing or predicting an outcome.

17:30 h
Trisha Donnelly
Invited by the studio Art and Space |Installation, Prof. Nora Schultz

Trisha Donnelly was born in San Francisco.

Idea and organization: Gabriele Edlbauer

Organization support and project coordination: Johannes Hoffmann, Katharina Köhle, Kristin Weissenberger, Michael Part, Noële Ody, Roland Kollnitz, Tobias Pilz, Yein Lee & Zahra Mirza

Graphic Design: Vika Prokopaviciute