Discursive Tour (EN): Alien Inside the Familiar: Estrangement as an Artistic Method

Discursive Tour (EN): Mirela Baciak
Alien Inside the Familiar: Estrangement as an Artistic Method

Thu 04.12., 18h

Guan Xiao’s exhibition "TEENAGER" mobilizes estrangement not only as a visual strategy but as a philosophical position. Her practice disorients the viewer with playful assemblages, contradictory materialities, surreal shelters and hybrid objects – each resisting a fixed interpretation. The artist’s juxtapositions evoke the uncanny in daily life, subtly echoing broader sociopolitical disjunctions – like China’s precarious identity between "devotion and restrain".

Mariela Baciak takes this logic further: by exploring estrangement as a mode of critical thinking and collective inquiry into the now. Drawing from feminist psychoanalysis and post-digital theory, we will ask: What makes an object or gesture "estranged"?  How can artistic estrangement help us process contemporary social and political contradictions – be it adolescence, belonging, nationhood or the museum itself?

Please register at: vermittlung@kunsthallewien.at

The participatory event is free of charge with a valid exhibition ticket.
Every Thu, 17 – 20h: pay what you can!