Briefly a Seagull

The exhibition is curated by Rafael Hofmann, a graduate of the ASA exchange program in Kumasi, Ghana. The opening will take place on November 3, 2025, at 11:15 h, and will be personally inaugurated by Rector Johann Hartle. The International Office warmly invites everyone to attend.

Between sky and water, land and sea, where the seagull hovers for a brief moment before it moves on. Briefly a Seagull traces this state of in-between: the suspension, the pause, the breath before change.
Set in the Aula of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, a space that itself tells a fiction. Its neoclassical architecture stages history as performance, mixing truth and invention, grandeur and illusion. Within this constructed narrative, the exhibition unfolds as another layer of fiction, one that floats between fact and imagination.
The works by exchange students from different continents, together with works by students from the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, create a dialogue across distances. The SUNY students sent works that could fit into a small suitcase carried by a faculty member, compact pieces that reflect the school’s multidisciplinary spirit and the diversity of its students’ interests and backgrounds. Their contributions explore themes of immigration and the American political landscape, gender identity, collective typographic experiments, and personal memory.
Everything is in flux: reflections, dissolving forms, shifting lines. The space itself begins to drift, no longer a backdrop but part of the story.
Briefly a Seagull is an exhibition about transition and flight, about telling and retelling, about the fragile act of hovering between realities, only for a moment, yet part of an ongoing movement.

Artists: Adelle Dogbey, Juno Rothaug, Lilly Gummerson, Luo Wenjia, Uri Gil Ad, Angela Illuzzi, Den Dimock, Christian Wilbur, Dani Rivera, Demi Johnson, Ella Slomba, Evan Galinski, Ester Lan Gardner, Gillian Rasenberger, Hallie Krause, Josie Merigliano, Jani Maria Morales, Jean Post, Justin Alvarez, Kelly Funes, Micela Distefano, Mae Shapiro, Sienna Cruz, Sofia Lugo, Sabrina Moore, Sam Webb-Horvath, Teresa Ricci, Vasilisa Semenova.