Okumura took its empty state as a departure point for his working process. But instead of bringing works to this ideal backdrop to isolate art from the world, the artist conceived three site-specific projects to rediscover the space as a lived room interconnected with the world marked by its own conditions and contexts. For each project, Okumura designed a playful procedure and asked people related to the Hauptraum to enact it.</p><p>Wilhelm as Hauptraum (2025) documents Okumura’s interview of Wilhelm “Willi” Montibeller, the former head of Secession’s installation team who worked here for more than twenty years. Instructed by the artist, Willi personifies the space by saying “my name is Hauptraum”, “I am the space”, and so on, yet sharing his own subjective recollections of some of the exhibitions he set up in the very space, in front of a miniature model of it. The camera focuses on his hands tracing in the air the forms of works that are absent in the scene yet exist in his memory.</p><p>For Secession’s Hive Mind(s) (2025), Okumura requested the board of Secession, consisting of artists and architects, to discuss a possible renaming of the Hauptraum, a name that connotes an unwanted hierarchy by literally meaning ‘main space’. Okumura then approached our press person Ramona ‘Mona’ Heinlein (who is me myself, in charge of this very text co-edited by the artist) and had her translate a German transcript of the board’s meeting into English all alone, verbally. As a result, the speaker in the video seems to have multiple personalities, just like how the board has many voices internally yet speaks as one voice outwardly, mediated by the press office. In a nod to the ‘hive mind’, a sci-fi term for collective consciousness, the monologue is accompanied by footage of beehives on the roof of Secession. Several colonies of bees live there, taken care of by one of our current chief installers Hans Weinberger, a trained beekeeper.&nbsp;</p><p>If these two projects narrate the biography of the space by examining its historical and institutional contexts, respectively, then Big White Empty Playground (2025) aims at tackling its personality by testing its physical conditions. Okumura invited those who regularly or intensely work in the Hauptraum to participate in this project. The interested members of Secession’s cleaning, education, security and exhibition set-up staff will attend a series of workshop sessions conducted by Okumura revolving around a chance-oriented, curiosity-driven, game-like method for art-making that he has developed with reference to conceptual art, experimental music, and postmodern dance. Each person will be encouraged to conceive three sets of simple instructions for them to perform “auto-active”, “counter-active”, and “inter-active” actions in the empty Hauptraum, using only their own bodies and things readily available in the building. Every procedure will be inspired by and interventional into certain material aspects of the space, based on the person’s own relation with it over the years. Direct outcomes will remain and constitute Big White Playground, a group exhibition taking over the room almost entirely.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p>" itemprop="description" />

Konrad’s photographic practice investigates architectural and urban structures and the utopian visions and contradictions implicit in them. Focusing on the commonplace rather than the iconic. She is especially fascinated with the demolition of architecture, which, she argues, always also harbors a sculptural potential. Experimentation with relations of scale, the perception of spaces, and various media parameters is a defining characteristic of her art, as is the critical engagement with the formal idioms of modernism and minimalism.</p><p>Konrad’s oeuvre is sustained by an extensive photographic archive. A kind of atlas surveying the history of architecture as well as contemporary cityscapes, it can be thought of as an inherently incomplete “living memory.” As the artist sees it, pictures are not self-contained entities with fixed meanings but fundamentally malleable depending on how, where, and in proximity to which others they are displayed.</p><p>For each new exhibition, Konrad reactivates this growing archive by juxtaposing photographs from different places and times. Engendering interconnections, oppositions, and coincides, she releases associations, knowledge, and recollections. The artist’s installations always take their cues from the particulars of the exhibition setting; photography, to her mind, is an intervention into a space that must be experienced with the whole body.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p>" itemprop="description" />