The curatorial team met in Ghana in February 2021 for the preparation of the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021: Planet Love. Climate Care in the Digital Age.
Ibrahim Mahama, Baerbel Mueller and Elisabeth Falkensteiner are working on the exhibition Ecologies and Politics of the Living, which takes place at the Angewandte Innovation Lab.
Ibrahim Mahama lives and works as an artist in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale (Ghana). His artistic practice is led by his interest in the history of materials and architecture, as well as by alternative perspectives of looking into the materials and labor conditions of society. His work has been included in the 56th, 57th, and 58th Venice Biennale, and in documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. He also made several contributions to the 22nd Biennale of Sydney. His current interests are using specific architectural forms within history in the formation of spaces inspired by the potentialities and failures of modernity.
Baerbel Mueller is an architect and researcher based in Austria and Ghana. She is Associate Professor at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and head of the [applied] Foreign Affairs lab, which investigates spatial, environmental, and cultural phenomena in rural and urban Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. She is also founder of nav_s baerbel mueller [navigations in the field of architecture and urban research within diverse cultural contexts]. Her work comprises architecture, urban research, installations, scenography, and curatorial projects. Mueller contributed to e. g., the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Marrakech Biennale, received the Ars Docendi State Award for excellence in teaching by the Republic of Austria, and published books like [applied] Foreign Affairs and Structures of Displacement.
Elisabeth Falkensteiner lives in Vienna and has been a curator at Angewandte Innovation Lab since 2019. Her work mainly focuses on feminist and political theory. She co-curated the 2018 and 2019 editions of Angewandte Festival and was responsible for Angewandte’s theory program at Vienna Biennale 2019. Falkensteiner was also co-curator of Reform Act, an exhibition and festival series at the intersection of visual arts, performance, and sound (2017–2018). In cooperation with musician Gischt, she also presented a sound installation in the context of the exhibition res.o.nant at Jüdisches Museum Berlin. Her texts have been previously featured in EIKON and PW-Magazine.
