Powerful, unsettling, and deeply timely—this trio of exhibitions in Vienna asks a simple but piercing question: what do we choose to keep, to erase, and to hear in our shared culture, and who gets to decide? And this is the part most people miss: each artist quietly challenges how institutions, technologies, and even public spaces shape what we remember and how we move through the world.
Duane Linklater, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Cevdet Erek are presenting new exhibitions at Secession in Vienna, Austria, running from November 29, 2025, across various end dates in February 2026. The shows take place at Secession, located at Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna, with visiting hours from Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm. Together, they transform the building into a space where archives, sound, and architecture become tools for questioning power, history, and perception.
Duane Linklater’s exhibition “mâcistan” runs from November 29, 2025 to February 15, 2026, and centers on a specially created, site-specific modular structure built around the idea of a “cache.” Rather than treating a cache as just a technical or storage term, Linklater expands it to mean an assembled collection of things—like the personal mementos, keepsakes, and small objects people gather in their homes over a lifetime. But here’s where it gets controversial: by connecting these intimate personal collections to the vast holdings of museums and their colonial histories, the work invites viewers to ask whether institutional collections are simply neutral guardians of culture or active participants in unequal power structures.
In “mâcistan,” the cache becomes a metaphor for the tangled stories that objects carry, including emotions, memories, and ideas that move across time and geography. It suggests that what is preserved is never just physical material; it is also the invisible web of feelings and narratives that surround these things. Linklater’s project has been developed in collaboration with Kunsthalle Bielefeld and Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, where further versions of the exhibition will be presented later in 2026, emphasizing that this is an evolving conversation rather than a closed statement. Special thanks are extended to Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) for supporting the project, highlighting how multiple institutions are involved in this reflection on collecting and colonial legacies.
Duane Linklater, born in 1976, is an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist from Moose Cree First Nation and lives in North Bay, on Robinson Huron Treaty territory. His background and location are not just biographical details; they inform the exhibition’s engagement with Indigenous histories and the politics of land, ownership, and representation. The exhibition is programmed by the board of Secession and curated by Haris Giannouras and Damian Lentini, whose curatorial framing further shapes how audiences encounter and interpret the work.
Mimi Ọnụọha’s exhibition “Soft Zeros,” on view from November 29, 2025 to February 22, 2026, turns attention to what is missing, incomplete, or deliberately excluded from archives and data sets. She explores the fragility and unreliability of archives and the shifting nature of knowledge, especially in an era dominated by digital systems. But here’s where it gets controversial: in a world obsessed with “big data” and information abundance, Ọnụọha focuses on absence—things that are not collected, not asked about, not permitted, or not represented at all.
Her work examines how silence and gaps take shape through algorithmic bias, historical denial, and collective forgetting, and how these absences themselves become meaningful. Rather than seeing missing data as a neutral accident, she suggests that what is left out often reveals power imbalances, social blind spots, or deliberate erasures. In her research-driven practice, Ọnụọha asks what forms of knowledge are being held back from us in an environment shaped by disinformation and polarization, and importantly, what role each of us plays in allowing or resisting this forgetting.
She has described the challenge of the present as learning to read “what seemingly isn’t there,” turning the act of noticing absence into a political and ethical skill. This idea can be applied well beyond art, for example, when we ask which communities are excluded from statistics, whose histories are under-documented, or which stories never make it into school curricula. Born in Italy in 1989 and currently living in New York, Ọnụọha brings a transnational perspective to questions of data, identity, and memory. Her exhibition is programmed by the Secession board and curated by Jeanette Pacher, whose curatorial approach helps unfold these complex ideas in an accessible way for visitors.
Cevdet Erek’s project “Secession Ornamentation,” also running from November 29, 2025 to February 22, 2026, extends his ongoing interest in sound, architecture, and what he calls “sound ornamentation.” Instead of thinking of ornament as purely visual decoration, Erek treats sound as something that can wrap around and embellish a building, changing how it is perceived. For this exhibition, he “ornamentates” the façade of Secession itself, using loudspeakers mounted on the exterior walls to highlight the building’s well-known architecture not only visually but also acoustically.
In this configuration, the façade effectively becomes a surface that can be heard, not just seen, inviting visitors to experience the institution from the outside in a new way. Erek draws inspiration from real-world devices of orientation and accessibility, such as acoustic signal boxes installed at traffic lights to support people with visual impairments. By referencing these tools, he raises questions about the politics of perception: how urban and institutional spaces are structured through systems of guidance, control, and care. But here’s where it gets controversial: does sound in public space function more as a form of support and openness, or as another mechanism of subtle regulation and control?
“Secession Ornamentation” is realized with support from the Kira A. Princess of Prussia Foundation, and SAHA has also provided assistance for Erek’s work, reflecting how philanthropic and cultural organizations contribute to the conditions under which such experiments become possible. Erek was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1974 and still lives there, and his practice frequently connects local references and global discourses about sound, public space, and design. The exhibition is programmed by the Secession board and curated by Bettina Spörr, whose curatorial role helps translate Erek’s sonic interventions into a coherent visitor experience.
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications that allow audiences to delve more deeply into the ideas and backgrounds of the projects. Digital versions of these publications are available free of charge through Secession’s website, making it easier for visitors and remote audiences alike to explore the artists’ practices in more detail. For press and professional inquiries, contact is available via the dedicated press email address, along with online access to press materials.
So, what do you think: are museums and cultural institutions neutral spaces of preservation, or do they inevitably reflect and reinforce certain power structures—through what they collect, what they omit, and how they shape our senses? Do you agree with these artists’ critiques of archives, sound, and space, or do you see their work differently? Share whether you think these interventions are provoking necessary conversations—or pushing the questions too far—and why.
