Anna Lerchbaumer: Open Tabs and Closed Locks
29.5.–31.5.2026
Anna Lerchbaumer
A set of bistro chairs, the remains of a stolen bicycle, or a key safe hidden behind a rain gutter. Like everyday objects that are enclosed or chained, Anna Lerchbaumer’s works temporarily lay claim to urban space. Against the backdrop of the Palais des Beaux Arts as an artistic interface, they interlock with the existing infrastructure. Her objects are secured off, yet still exposed and vulnerable to their surroundings. As site-specific, encrypted signs, they examine forms of inclusion and exclusion in the post-digital public sphere. Access failed. Caps Lock enabled? H-E-R-E, at the fenced-off Rudolf-von-Alt-Platz and the barred windows of the building at Löwengasse 47A, Anna Lerchbaumer’s sculptures enter into a dialogue with the history of expropriation and artistic reappropriation of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien.
Hosting a collection of commissioned artworks and texts, the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien surrounds an Art Nouveau building of the same name from 1908. Without a key to access the building, artists are invited each year to engage with the violent past, shaky present, and potential futures of the site. Here, the institutional framework takes on multiple roles of occupation, probing whether, and how, artistic interventions can apply pressure to larger technological, aesthetic, and political surfaces, if at all.