Artistic Gathering
MQ Artists-in-Residence

Opening Wed 11.02., 18–22h l MQ Raum D l free admission

The following openings will take place in the MQ Showrooms on the same evening:

MQ Artist-in-Residence Selbi Jumayeva l Steppe Synanthropies: Data Tapestry

artVideoLoop: Ursula Maria Probst & Raashish India - PEACE STARTS WITH A SMILE

Martin Markeli: Open Atelier – Back from Miami candy

Artistic Gathering is an exhibition that brings together artists from different countries and institutional contexts. Works created or further developed during the residency come into dialogue, making individual artistic processes visible. Conceived as a space for encounter, exchange, and shared reflection, the group exhibition invites collaboration and conversation.

The event is organized in cooperation with BMEIA, BMWKMS and tranzit.org/ERSTE Foundation.

Participating MQ Artists-in-Residence:
EtchingRoom1, Serge Bulat, Seshile Manzini, Slobodan Šnajder & Zarina Mingazova

MQ AiR EtchingRoom1: Just one more day
recommending institution: tranzit.org/ERSTE Stiftung

etchingroom1.com
instagram.com/etching.room1

artist’s statement:
In the project Just one more day, fragments of everyday life are brought together — days that repeat yet consistently deviate from what was planned. The series are connected not by a shared subject but by a mutual attention to subtle shifts that quietly shape our experience.
The works presented in Raum D in the MuseumsQuartier contain no major events: only familiar moments that recur and structure the rhythm of a day. We continually anticipate change — a new habit “starting Monday,” a fresh beginning “after this coffee,” an ideal schedule we believe we will follow this time. Yet even minor deviations can disrupt this internal framework: plans shift, expectations dissolve, and the day assumes a different configuration.
These works capture this instability — the space between intention and accident, between the expected scenario and the actual course of events. Within this space emerges the daily act of maintaining balance, repeated again and again.

EtchingRoom1 is a women artists’ collective founded in 2016 by Kristina Yarosh and Anna Khodkova in Kyiv, Ukraine. Their practice is rooted in the visual arts and encompasses multiple media, including paper, porcelain, mosaic, and installation. Within a single project, they often combine these media to achieve a stronger and more intense visual expression. EtchingRoom1 is currently based in Berlin.

MQ AiR Serge Bulat: Idle Labor. Artist / Product
recommending institution: BMWKMS

sergebulat.com/
www.instagram.com/sergebulat/

artist statement:
Idle Labor: Artist / Product is a durational performative installation that reconfigures the artist as a functional component within a system of machines. Seated among obsolete computers and devices, the artist interacts only minimally with a laptop labeled “artist”, while his own body is marked as “product”. This inversion displaces authorship from the human subject to technological infrastructure, positioning the artist as a form of infrastructure rather than a creative origin.
The work stages a condition in which labour persists without visible output. Presence itself becomes a mode of production, revealing productivity as a continuous, embodied process rather than a measurable result. By collapsing distinctions between creator, tool, and commodity, the installation exposes artistic practice as a form of labour shaped by digital environments, institutional frameworks, and economies of visibility.
A sound layer derived from recordings of Thomas Feuerstein’s METABOLICA, captured in MQ Freiraum, unfolds as a temporal structure within the work. Experienced either within the exhibition space or through headphones, the soundscape is activated at certain moments through short, intimate listening sessions. Sound functions as a trace of processes that usually remain invisible, intensifying the tension between human agency and technological automation.
Through this constellation, Idle Labor: Artist / Product reflects on how artistic practice is increasingly mediated, extracted, and performed within systems where human intention and technological operation are inseparably intertwined.

Serge Bulat is a multidisciplinary artist working across sound, performance, and installation. Born in Moldova and based in the United States, his practice examines how identity, technology, and perception are shaped through listening, presence, and systems of production. Moving between composition, performative situations, and spatial works, he treats sound not only as material but as a social and political condition. Through projects such as Cornershop, Inkblot, and Phonomundi, Bulat develops experimental formats that blur boundaries between artist and audience, machine and body, fiction and documentation.

Serge Bulat is a fellow of the „Fokus International“ program, which is run in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKÖS). During his residency at MQ, Bulat will support the team at mica – music austria.

MQ AiR Sesihle Manzini: PALIMPSEST. INSCRIPTIONS ON MEMORY
A collaborative work by the filmmaker Sesihle Manzini and the photographer Zach Stewart
recommending institution: BMWKMS

https://www.annodominimag.africa/
https://www.instagram.com/annodominimag/

artist statement:
This multimedia installation PALIMPSEST. INSCRIPTIONS ON MEMORY explores how histories are written, overwritten, and recovered through the lens of South Africa’s Stadsaal Caves — a site where architects of apartheid inscribed their names onto rock walls already covered in ancient San rock art. Using archival imagery, sound, film, and participatory elements, the work investigates memory as a site of violence, resistance, and re-imagination.
The Stadsaal Caves are located in the Cederberg Mountains, approximately a three-hour drive north of Cape Town. The area is a rugged, rocky landscape known for wilderness hiking, farming, and its significant San rock art. The name “Stadsaal,” meaning “City Hall,” refers both to the wide caverns of the caves and to their historical use as a meeting place for architects of apartheid prior to its official implementation. Many of the leaders who gathered there signed their names onto the cave walls. Notable signatories include Dr. D. F. Malan, a church minister and leader of the National Party, as well as members of the Niewoudt family, who colonised much of the surrounding land as farmers and whose descendants continue to occupy it today.
Part of the reason for choosing this image as a visual synthesis for the film poster lies in its striking quality as an act of imagination imposed upon the land. These leaders chose a cave as their meeting place and quite literally wrote themselves into the landscape. This act was theological, imaginative, and a distorted form of prophetic gesture. Directly opposite the signatures of the apartheid leaders is a vast mural of San rock art painted beneath an overhang, depicting elephants and human figures gazing out over the surrounding landscape. The act of signing the land thus reads as an opposition — a challenge to the imagination and cosmology that already existed in this place.
This exhibition is committed to collaborative practices, providing a platform for several South African artists and creating space for collective reflection.

Sesihle Manzini is a South African documentary filmmaker and cultural curator working at the intersection of history, memory, and spatial justice. Her practice moves between archival research, cinematic storytelling, and public dialogue—creating films that function as tools for collective reflection rather than closed texts. Rather than traditional screenings, she develops experiential programmes that pair documentary with facilitated dialogue, site visits, and community engagement - work that has reached universities, museums, embassies, and civil society spaces across South Africa, Europe, and the USA.

Sesihle Manzini is a fellow of the “Focus International” program, which was launched in 2023 in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKÖS). During her residency at MQ, Manzini will support the team of Tricky Women / Tricky Realities. 

Zach Stewart

Zach Stewart is a multimedia artist based in Cape Town and the host of a local food cooperative. He holds a BAFA from the University of Cape Town. In his artistic practice, he works across sculpture, animation, video installation, illustration, and performance, exploring queer identities as well as whiteness in the South African landscape.

Lately, he has been increasingly focused on creating objects and curiosities. While his themes are often informed by intense historical contexts, he approaches them with humor and a strong sensitivity to materiality and tactility, inviting audiences to engage with challenging content through intimate, bodily experience rather than from a didactic distance.

MQ Writer-in-Residence Slobodan Šnajder
recommending institution: BMEIA

Slobodan Šnajder (b. 1948) is a Croatian writer who studied Philosophy and English at the University of Zagreb. Until the end of the first decade of his career, he primarily wrote plays – around 30 in total – worked in theater, published a theater journal, and played a significant role in shaping the Croatian theater scene. His dramatic work has been performed internationally, including the play The Croatian Faust (1994, Burgtheater Vienna).
In recent years, Šnajder has increasingly focused on prose. His novel Repairing the World (2018, Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna) has been translated into 13 languages. His second novel, Angel of Disappearance, was published in 2025.
He is currently working on a third novel closely connected to Austrian history – both the prosperous and the troubled periods after the First and Second World Wars – drawing parallels to the breakup of Yugoslavia. During his two-month residency at MQ, he is gathering impressions, researching historical sources, and visiting museums such as the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum and the Mauthausen concentration camp. The novel explores themes including the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the role of SS guards, and historical parallels to crimes committed in Croatia. The book is still in progress and is expected to be completed in about a year.

MQ AiR Zarina Mingazova: Flowergatherers / Blumensammler
recommending institution: KABINETTcomicpassage

zarinasaidova.com
@zarina.gif

artist statement:
“When the noise is too loud, we gather flowers “

Zarina Saidova (b. 1992) is an artist, illustrator, and comics creator from Kazakhstan, currently based in Oslo. She holds a Master’s degree from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and is co-founder of the independent publishing house Træsh.
Her work explores visual storytelling through comics, books, and exhibitions, often combining playful and symbolic elements.
During her residency at MuseumsQuartier, Zarina Saidova Mingazova presents Conversation with the Sun, a visual narrative exploring themes of identity, belonging, and transformation. The artist invites audiences into a poetic world of images where personal and collective stories intertwine. The exhibition opening and publication presentation take place on Thursday, 26 February 2026, at 6:30 PM, and the works can be experienced until 10 June 2026 at the KABINETT comic passage.