From 20th May to 23th September, 2023
Artists: Sam Cottington / Caspar Heinemann / Deborah-Joyce Holman / David Moser / Phung-Tien Phan / Alex Dolores Salerno / Francis Whorrall-Campbell / Quay Quinn Wolf / Leto Ybarra
Curated by: Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo (Yaby)
Image of the installation Trap Piece 7 (BPA) The Taste of Water: Leaking Vessels, Fluid Rituals, and Unconsented Collaborations, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, November 2022 – March 2023 © Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
The term sneckdown refers to an accumulation of snow covering part of the roadway, obscuring asphalt markings and extending the initial boundaries of pedestrian spaces. During the temporary erasure of visual cues that normally dictate traffic flow, new paths are carved out on the snow, revealing alternate desires, needs, and relationships with public space. The result is a powerful image reflecting normative and non-normative uses of the environment, as well as concepts of visibility, invisibility, and circulation.
Sneckdown brings together the work of nine young international artists who explore various intersections between identity and space. The selected works formally elaborate themes derived from contemporary critical discourse around visibility, the encoding of situated expressions, and the political geometries of intersection, confrontation, and solidarity. These issues are approached through spatial considerations that avoid direct representation, such as access, exclusion, staging, belonging, control, or infiltration.
