Klima Biennale Wien
Interdisciplinary, low-threshold and interactive: this is how the first Klima Biennale Wien presented itself. The innovative climate art festival started on 5 April and ended on 14 July. For 100 days, it focused on the potential of art, design, architecture and science in relation to a sustainable and liveable future and the social impact of climate change. The Biennale was initiated by the Climate, Culture and Economy Departments of the City of Vienna and organised by KunstHausWien. Thanks to more than 100 cooperation partners, it took place throughout the city.
Under the direction of Sithara Pathirana and Claudius Schulze, the first Climate Art Festival focused on participation, global networking and cooperation. The extensive and multi-perspective programme of the Klima Biennale Wien focused on cooperation and invited people to participate in a dialogue on future social developments.
City programme with cooperation partners
Together with more than 100 institutions, initiatives and organisations, the Klima Biennale Wien has created a programme to communicate the concerns of the climate debate to a broad audience. A programme focusing on sustainability, art and alternative approaches to climate change: this was the start of the first edition of the Klima Biennale Wien, positioning the City of Vienna as a pioneer in combining current ecological challenges with art, design, architecture and science. Alongside established art institutions and festivals such as Belvedere 21, the Weltmuseum and the Wiener Festwochen, representatives of Vienna's independent art scene and organisations such as Volkshilfe Wien also joined the ambitious programme. The Biennale is supported financially and in terms of content by three departments of the City of Vienna.
Raising awareness and informing people about climate change issues through art was a central goal of the newly founded Vienna Climate Biennale, which took place throughout Vienna from 4 April to 14 July. The first edition of the festival attracted more than 225,000 visitors, who were shown and discussed the urgency of the global climate crisis in 30 exhibitions and 780 events. The great success of the initiative is largely due to the collaboration with more than 100 partner institutions and supporters from the arts, science, business, education and social sectors. The diversity of the programme was impressive: exhibitions, discourse formats, talks, lectures, dilemma salons, dialogue talks, panels, concerts, symposia, processions, an activism camp, a climate summit, reading series, interventions, performances, workshops, dialogue tours, guided tours and, of course, parties took place at a total of 87 venues. Vienna was not the only city to host events; partners in Graz, Linz, Heiligenblut, St. Pölten and the Salzkammergut also joined the initiative. The 30 exhibitions organised in cooperation with the Vienna Climate Biennale - including 5 in-house productions - attracted around 200,000 visitors.
Biennale Zentrale at KunstHausWien
The headquarters of the Biennale was located in KunstHausWien, whose sustainable renovation was completed before the start of the Climate Biennale. "Into the Woods", the group exhibition of the first Vienna Climate Biennale, curated by Sophie Haslinger, was dedicated to one of the most important ecosystems of our time: on two floors of the museum, 16 contemporary positions addressed the human influence on the state of forests and their destruction on the one hand, and the collective and symbiotic activities of the forest ecosystem on the other.
In the Garage project space, the Hamburg-based artists' collective Baltic Raw Org set up ARAPOLIS, an interactive game arrangement in the Garage project space (the Game) and a spatial installation at the Nordwestbahnhof festival site (the ARK). Visitors were invited to imagine different scenarios and place bets on the future. The seven bets decided on access to the ark, which was ready for departure at the Nordwestbahnhof. ARAPOLIS intervenes at the point where socially created structures appear as an inert, barely changeable system. But where the individual seems to have lost confidence in his own power to act, this is the point of contradiction.
The inner courtyard was transformed into a temporary and sustainable event space for talks, performances, concerts and community meetings: the "Climate Culture Pavilion", designed by the Breathe Earth Collective for the Graz 2020 Cultural Year, was adapted for the Vienna Climate Biennale according to the principles of reuse and upcycling. In June 2024, the KunstHausWien also hosted the first Vienna Climate Summit (Wiener Klimagipfel) - a new interactive symposium format aimed at the school and out-of-school education community, with workshops as well as scientific and artistic impulses.
Festivalareal Nordwestbahnhof
The festival area on the site of the Nordwestbahnhof created an experimental field for urban coexistence and presented artistic perspectives for a future worth living. The group exhibition "Songs for the Changing Seasons", curated by Lucia Pietroiusti (Head of Ecologies, Serpentine, London) and Filipa Ramos (Lecturer, Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN), University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), Basel) brought together international artists to reflect on how art deals with the effects, consequences and reality of environmental change in a concrete and poetic way, between mourning and transformation. Together with Isolde Rajek, StudioVlayStreeruwitz designed the festival area and revitalised the former Nordwestbahnhof site into a temporary example of an urban utopia. The "Climate Canteen" was created as a gastronomic offering that focuses on the food supply of the future. In cooperation with Vienna Design Week, the "Design with a Purpose" exhibition showcased outstanding, green and circular design from Austria. In "Biofabrique Vienna" - a pilot project of the Vienna Business Agency based on the bioregional design practice of Jan Boelen and his team - unused and reused resources were processed into new materials for design and architecture in cooperation with the Vienna University of Technology. In "Strategies & Solutions", students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Technical University of Vienna developed projects on art and climate.
Education, outreach and local participation
Projects such as the "Mobile School for Art & Sustainability", developed in cooperation with Soho Studios, the "DOCK for Change", designed by the Children's Office of the University of Vienna, the "Future Lab", created in cooperation with Volkshilfe Wien, and the "Bildungswege" by FutureWorks were dedicated to actively involving children and young people in shaping a sustainable future.
With "Immediate Matters", the Klima Biennale Wien brought together artistic positions from all over Vienna through an open call to address the challenges of the climate crisis in free project spaces, independent spaces and galleries.
