MQ Art Box
The MQ ART BOX in the Main Courtyard of MuseumsQuartier Wien features temporary installations by contemporary artists. The transparent art space interacts with the public realm. The exhibition program offers insights into contemporary artistic practices and fields of discourse.
daily 00:00-24:00h at the MQ Main Courtyard, free admission
Stephanie Winter & SALON HYBRID
Roots of Resistance – Fictions of Survival
Opening: Wed 14.05.2025, 18h l MQ Art Box, main courtyard
exhibition: 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. In her performative office SALON HYBRID and the feminist laboratory MOTHERBOARD, she creates hybrid spaces in the field of tension between the personal, political, and ecological. Her large-scale works series challenge patriarchal structures and explore processes of social and ecological consciousness.
Stephanie Winter’s installation for the glass MQ Art Box is Roots of Resistance – Fictions of Survival: a tentacular cave bathed in warm orange tones, which can be understood both as a symbol of the origins of human storytelling and as the speculative excavation site for a future archaeology. Nerves, roots, and dream-tentacles weave through the space, connecting the visible with the invisible, the terrestrial with the psychological. Imagined archaeological artifacts and amorphous beings populate the cave.
The installation, which will evolve over the course of the exhibition, embodies an inner psychic landscape: a space of collective imagination. It opens up a narrative field for stories of resistance, healing, and transformation. The cave becomes a vessel for forgotten, unheard, and visionary voices—including those of early thinkers, writers, and feminists. Their contributions will be shared, among others, in the SHARING SESSION: Unearthing Female Voices.
In Roots of Resistance, a defiant ecosystem unfolds. One that fosters relationships: with what was, with what is emerging, with what is still possible. Here, survival is not understood as mere endurance, but as a radical, communal process: a practice of care, change, and collective reimagining.
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 been exhibited internationally and have received multiple awards—including in 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.
Wed 14.05.2025, 18h
Performative opening
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.
CANCELLED!! Tue 17.06.2025, 18h
SHARING SESSION: Unearthing Female Voices
Collective Gathering
This SHARING SESSION is part of an ongoing series created by Stephanie Winter. It‘s a fluid, welcoming space for shared stories, collective care, and hopeful visions. In ‘Unearthing Female Voices,’ participants are invited to bring a woman's voice – whether lost, forgotten, remembered, or newly discovered – in the form of text, song, research, movement, or performance.
Tue 01.07.2025, 19h
CLAY SESSION: Characters of Resistance
Collective Performance & Workshop
In this SESSION, visitors are invited to participate in a collective workshop/performance. Together with the artist and her SALON HYBRID team, they will shape clay ‘Characters of Resistance’ and find their own role in the movement.
