Opening: Stephanie Winter & SALON HYBRID l Roots of Resistance – Fictions of Survival

Stephanie Winter & SALON HYBRID
ROOTS OF RESISTANCE – Fictions of Survival

Opening: Wed, 14.05. 2025, 18h l MQ Art Box, MQ Main Courtyard
Stephanie Winter and SALON HYBRID open Roots of Resistance – Fictions of Survival with a performative sequence that reveals the first image of the installation. The artist will serve her feminist cocktails.

Exhibition duration: 15.05. – 24.08.2025

The interdisciplinary artist Stephanie Winter operates at the intersection of artistic research, speculative fiction, installation, performance, film, and participatory formats. She develops immersive experiential spaces – multisensory, walk-in installations that serve as social interfaces, stages, and sites of collective knowledge production. Dedicated to terrestrial consciousness, her work combines atmospheric intensity with intellectual depth, addressing transformation, feminism, ecology, posthumanism, and interspecies connectedness.
Collaboration is a vital aspect of her artistic practice. Winter invites experts, artists, visitors, and non-human beings into ever-evolving laboratories, installations, and alternative worlds. Her large-scale works series challenge patriarchal structures and explore processes of social and ecological consciousness.

For the MQ Art Box, she presents Roots of Resistance – Fictions of Survival—a tentacular, orange-hued cave that evokes both the origins of storytelling and a speculative archaeology of the future. Nerves, roots, and dream-like tentacles connect the visible with the invisible, the terrestrial with the psychic.
As the installation evolves over time, it becomes a living ecosystem—an inner landscape for stories of resistance, healing, and transformation. Survival here is envisioned as a radical, collective act of care and reinvention.

Curator: Verena Kaspar-Eisert

Stephanie Winter lives and works in Vienna. From 2001 to 2007, she studied painting and post-conceptual art practices at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Berlin University of the Arts. Her works have have received multiple awards and have been exhibited internationally —including Vienna, Paris, New York, and South Korea.

SALON HYBRID is Winter’s collaborative, performative office: an organically evolving constellation that transforms depending on the project context. For Roots of Resistance, the current team includes Bettina Eigner and Linn Maurer.

Image: The Cave Installation © Stephanie Winter