Exhibition Tour: Thinking Through Weibel

Thinking Through Weibel gathers key works out of the Peter Weibel Archive, held by the Collection and Archive at the University of Applied Arts and positions them in relation to contemporary practices by invited international artists, that unfold through distinct conceptual and material approaches. Their contributions do not follow or extend Peter Weibel’s logic, but move across and against it, forming intersections without fixing relationships.

Attention turns particularly to Weibel’s earlier years, when sculptural inquiries merged with performance, film, and written language. That early period reveals a restless movement across mediums and media, driven by a desire to test the limits of perception and to upend disciplinary borders.

The exhibition highlights the entwined currents of politics, sexuality, and playfulness that animate Weibel’s experiments. Performative actions, text works, and spatial propositions from Weibel’s early practice appear alongside the works of the participating artists. These juxtapositions are not structured as reflections or responses. Rather, they allow for a set of overlapping gestures, divergences, and refusals.

Thinking Through Weibel emerges as both encounter and departure. It is, at once, an effort to dwell within the experimental urgencies that animated Weibel’s creative and intellectual life, and a movement beyond those urgencies toward possibilities he could not, and perhaps would not, fully account for. The exhibition offers an engagement with Weibel’s practices – his modes of making, his orientations toward materiality, medium, technology and form – as a way of apprehending the contours of his self-making. Yet, it simultaneously demands a thinking through the structures that conditioned his interventions: to traverse the Western epistemological frames that shaped his project and to imagine alongside traditions, practices, and intellectual itineraries that move otherwise. In doing so, it invites an inquiry not into a closed legacy, but into the open-endedness of artistic thought across and against imposed boundaries.

Artists:

Morehshin Allahyari, Nancy Baker Cahill, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jakob Lena Knebl, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Thania Petersen, Eva Schlegel, and Peter Weibel

Curated by Valerie Messini and Brooklyn J. Pakathi

The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

is a space for intervention, investigation, and experimentation within the expansive disciplines of arts, science, and technologies. Based at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the institute critically engages digital and algorithmic cultures. Building on the rich heritage of Viennese investigations into cybernetics, net cultures, media art, and tactical media, the institute serves as a vital node within a global network of research institutions on digital cultures.

The Weibel Institute strives to challenge the underlying logics of digital cultures, unraveling the intricacies of cybernetic control systems and machine learning processes, the dynamics of online communities, the vast landscape of media-technological infrastructures, and their continued entanglements. This endeavor is guided by a commitment to remaking research itself, taking into account reflexive methodologies and seeking collective expressions. Taking on social and ecological responsibility in the face of emerging data systems, the institute questions the extractivist origins of digital landscapes and explores potential technological approaches beyond today’s data positivism. The Weibel Institute invites researchers, students, artists, and activists to join a space for reflection, discussion, and collaboration. Offering access to resources such as the Peter Weibel Archive and an extensive library, the institute fosters theoretical and artistic explorations that probe deeper into the cultures that make up our digital spaces. This public program includes lectures, symposia, exhibitions, workshops, and other activities.

Peter Weibel

(5 March 1944, Odessa – 1 March 2023, Karlsruhe) was an Austrian artist, curator, and art- and media theorist. He is perhaps best known internationally for serving as director of the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe), which he led from 1999 to 2023, transforming it into a globally influential laboratory linking art, science, and society and staging landmark projects. In this position he started to reframe debates on images, democracy, data, and ecology.

In 2017, following his donation of a substantial part of his archive to the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures was established with Weibel as founding director. 

Even while mostly based elsewhere, Weibel remained a distinctly Viennese figure – woven into the city’s culture and memory. From the 1960s, Weibel’s ties to Vienna run through study, debate, teaching, and institution-building, culminating in his resting place: in 1964 he studied at the University of Vienna (initially medicine, then mathematics with a focus on logic); in 1968 he participated in the famous action ‘Kunst und Revolution’ at the University of Vienna; from 1976 he taught at several institutions including the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he was appointed Professor für Visuelle Mediengestaltung in 1984. Between 1968 and 2014 he showed his work in various (twelve) exhibitions, founded the Hotel Morphila Orchestra and was appointed the curator for the Austrian Pavillon at the Venice Bienniale for several years (1993,1995,1997,1999). Part of his work is preserved in the Weibel-Archiv at the Kunstsammlung und Archiv at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The state of Austria paid tribute to him by dedicating an honorary grave at the Wiener Zentralfriedhof.