Secession Podcast

Seit mehr als fünf Jahrzehnten widmet sich Bernhard Leitner der Idee, mit Ton – seiner Bewegung, Frequenz, Klangfarbe und Lautstärke – skulptural Raum zu formen und zu gestalten. Bereits ab 1969, mit der Übersiedlung von Wien nach New York, wo er bis 1982 leben sollte, hielt er erste theoretische Überlegungen zu Ton-Raum-Skulpturen in Zeichnungen und Notizen fest. Hier begann der ausgebildete Architekt, dessen Denken ebenso von Neuer Musik wie von klassischem und zeitgenössischem Tanz sowie bildender Kunst beeinflusst ist, Ton als Baumaterial zu begreifen.

In dieser Folge, aufgenommen am 22. Oktober 2026, spricht Jeanette Pacher mit Bernhard Leitner über den zweijährigen Entstehungsprozess der Ausstellung, die gezeigten Arbeiten sowie die langjährige Auseinandersetzung des Künstlers mit Klang als Material und mit Sound Art.

Bernhard Leitner
SOUNDSPACESCULPTURE
11.9. – 22.11.2026

In seiner großen Einzelausstellung SOUNDSPACESCULPTURE präsentiert Bernhard Leitner eine neue großformatige Arbeit, die er für diesen Anlass entwickelt hat, im Kontext einiger ausgewählter Arbeiten. Die Schau bietet somit die Möglichkeit, sich mit Leitners künstlerischem Schaffen und wichtigsten Forschungsfragen auseinanderzusetzen und seine skulpturalen Klangarchitekturen oder klanglichen Raumzeichnungen nicht nur akustisch, sondern ganzheitlich körperlich zu erhören. Als Pionier der Sound Art hat Leitner nachfolgende Generationen von Künstler*innen nachhaltig geprägt. Diese Ausstellung spannt einen weiten Bogen von frühen theoretischen Untersuchungen in Skizzen, Fotografien und Grafiken über bedeutende Werke zur Idee des „Körper Hörens“ bis zu einer neu für die Secession geschaffenen Arbeit – Wasser Würfel / Wand Wellen (2026).  Mehr erfahren

Bernhard Leitner wurde 1938 in Feldkirch, Österreich, geboren und lebt und arbeitet in Wien und Gaindorf, Österreich. Der Künstler, Universitätsprofessor und Autor zählt zu den prägenden Vertretern der internationalen Sound Art. Nach seinem Architekturstudium an der Technischen Universität Wien arbeitete er von 1963 bis 1966 in den Pariser Ateliers AUA (Atelier d’urbanisme et d’architecture) und Paul Bossard. Von 1969 bis 1971 war er als Urban Designer im Department of City Planning der Stadt New York tätig, bevor er 1972 als Associate Professor und Co-Direktor des Studienprogramms Urban Design – Humanistic Perspectives an die New York University berufen wurde. 1969 beginnt er Ton-Raum-Untersuchungen. 1982 übersiedelte Leitner von New York nach Berlin, wo er bis 1986 lebte. Von 1987 bis 2005 hatte er eine Professur für Medienübergreifende Kunst an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien inne und leitete dort die gleichnamige Meisterklasse. Im Zentrum seines künstlerischen Werks stehen die Wechselwirkungen von Klang, Raum und Körper, die er in begehbaren Klanginstallationen und skulpturalen Arbeiten erforscht. Seine Arbeiten wurden weltweit gezeigt, darunter auf der documenta 7 (1982), der Biennale von Venedig (1986) sowie in zahlreichen internationalen Museen und öffentlichen Räumen

Jeanette Pacher ist seit 2007 Kuratorin an der Secession. Darüber hinaus ist sie Lehrbeauftragte in der Abteilung für Ortsbezogene Kunst an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Mitglied des BIG ART Fachbeirats und war von 2023 bis 2025 Mitglied der Jury für KÖR – Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien.

Programmiert vom Vorstand der Secession
Das Dorotheum ist exklusiver Sponsor der Secession-Podcasts.
Jingle: Hui Ye mit einem Auszug aus Combat of dreams für Streichquartett und Audio-Feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) von Alexander J. Eberhard
Schnitt: Paul Macheck
Soundtrack: aufgenommen in der Ausstellung mit Musik von Linus Hillborg und Marlena Salonen
Produktion: Jeanette Pacher

“Something that [my mum] taught me was this verse in the New Testament, ‘(pppppppp)pray without ceasing’, and I really hold on to that verse. It is a guide for me because that’s how I think about this calendar. I can always be (ofofofofofof)offering a prayer or a reflection of honor (tt)to an Ancestor, no matter what day it is.” (JJJJJerome Ellis in a conversation with Christine Sun Kim published in the accompanying book - free download here)

JJJJJerome Ellis
An unfinished calendar
that commemorates slaves
escaping their enslavers, 1673–1886
11.9. – 22.11.2026

Multimedia artist, musician, composer, poet, and performer JJJJJerome Ellis explores the intersections of Blackness, music, spirituality, and non-normative speech, creating spaces for healing and communion. In this exhibition, they have filled the walls with calendrical lists on paper, executed in charcoal and adorned with flowers drawn in oil pastel. With one sheet for each day and month, the work spans the entire duration of the exhibition. The lists record the names of enslaved people who liberated themselves in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, together with the dates and places of their escapes. Throughout the space, a recording of the artist’s voice describes the installation and reads aloud the names assigned to each day. As the first-floor gallery is not accessible by lift, duplicates of the pages are available so that visitors can touch and encounter them at close range. More

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice. JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!

Bettina Spörr is an art historian and has been a curator at the Secession since 2008. During this time, she has developed more than 60 solo exhibitions in close collaboration with artists and collectives of all generations and from across the globe, including exhibitions with Laura Owens, Francis Alÿs, Nicole Eisenman, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carlos Bunga, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Delaine Le Bas, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Francis Offman, June Crespo, Marianna Simnett, Katherine Hubbard, and JJJJJerome Ellis.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr

Curator Haris Giannouras reads a letter addressed to the artist Lap-See Lam. The artist reads her response which was written following the opening of her exhibition 192 Wing Lok Street at Secession. Their exchange is scored by parts of the sound work included in the exhibition composed by Linus Hillborg & Marlena Salonen.

Lap-See Lam
192 Wing Lok Street
11.9. – 22.11.2026

Lap-See Lam currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Lam’s work traverses diverse genres and disciplines, from video installation to live performance, blending contemporary technology with traditional references and methods. Lam was the recipient of the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award 2025 and represented Sweden at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.

In 2021, she was awarded the Dagens Nyheter Culture Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden (2026); PHI Foundation, Montreal; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (all in 2025); The Power Plant, Toronto, and Studio Voltaire, London (both in 2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Swiss Institute, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; and Lidköping Konsthall, Lidköping (all in 2023); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2022, 2018); Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim (2021); and Moderna Museet Malmö (2018–2019).

Lam has participated in group exhibitions at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2026); Ghost 2565, Bangkok (2022); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (2021); Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2020); Performa 19, New York (2019); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2019); Luleå Biennial, Luleå (2018); Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, Kópavogur (2018); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017).

Haris Giannouras works closely with artists to make exhibitions, artworks, publications, and events. He is currently working at the Secession in Vienna. Before that he was working at MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt, where he contributed to the exhibition There is no there there, a large-scale survey dedicated to artists with refugee, exile, and migration backgrounds who lived and worked in divided Germany from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Prior to that, he worked at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, where he co-curated exhibitions and produced publications with Hiwa K, Ghislaine Leung, and Studio for Propositional Cinema. Recent projects include work with Cana Bilir-Meier, Atelier Bow-Wow, Andrea Büttner, Jamie Crewe, Beatrice Gibson, Onyeka Igwe, Duane Linklater, Reba Maybury, Mire Lee, and Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, and the Estate of Suzan Pitt. Haris Giannouras is currently pursuing a doctorate dissertation researching quoting and discursivity in painting after 1990.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Soundtrack: recorded in the exhibition space, with music by Linus Hillborg and Marlena Salonen
Executive Producer: Haris Giannouras, Bettina Spörr

Marianna Simnett shares insights into her conceptual thinking and the creative process behind her exhibition Circus at the Secession, a multimedia exhibition that brought together light, sound, and sculptural works drawing on her Yugoslav heritage. This episode was recorded on 6 March 2026, the day after the opening.

Marianna Simnett
Circus
6.3. – 31.5.2026

Personal references, including a work that was inspired by her Jewish-Croatian grandfather’s experience during the Holocaust, intersect with nods to folkloric bogeywomen, who may interchangeably figure as threat or ally, and the traditional Balkan skirt that stages the delicate play of revealing and concealing intimate body parts. The show’s Circus theme manifests itself in a variety of ways throughout the presentation: in the maniacal spinning of a skirt overhead, alluding to a circus tent; in a stage for a performance; in the sound of torturous laughter; or in dazzling lights illuminating a darkened space.

Simnett’s practice consistently engages with intense corporeal states – urinating, fainting, the sensation of being tickled – which she taps into in an investigation of pleasure and pain. Having grown up in Great Britain as the daughter of a Croatian mother during the Yugoslav Wars, the artist remembers a recurring fantasy of a urinating figure resembling a folkloric female character who lifts her skirt to expose her genitalia to ward off evil spirits. Translated into neon lighting, this figure oscillates between provocation and defence, between abjection and agency. Neon does not merely illuminate; it intrudes. It screams, demands attention, and collapses distance. Building on the legacy of Bruce Nauman’s neon works, light in Simnett’s Fountain (2026) becomes a body in its own right – one that addresses, agitates, and physically affects the viewer. More

Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) is a British-Croatian multidisciplinary artist living and working between Berlin and New York. Her immersive narratives centre around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care.

Simnett’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Secession, Vienna (2026); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl (2026); Société, Berlin (2025, 2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2024); LAS, Berlin (2023); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Kunsthalle Zürich (2019); MMK, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018); The New Museum, New York (2018) and Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022); Espressioni: The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); and Prize of the Böttcherstraße, Kunsthalle Bremen (2022).

Bettina Spörr is an art historian and has been a curator at the Secession since 2008. During this time, she has developed more than 60 solo exhibitions in close collaboration with artists and collectives of all generations and from across the globe, including exhibitions with Laura Owens, Francis Alÿs, Nicole Eisenman, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carlos Bunga, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Delaine Le Bas, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Francis Offman, June Crespo, Marianna Simnett, and Katherine Hubbard. 

Programmed by the board of the Secession.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr

Artists Katherine Hubbard and Sophie Thun explore how Hubbard's work is positioned within queer feminist art and critically engages with the tradition of analogue photography. The conversation was recorded during the installation of the exhibition on 7 June 2026.

Katherine Hubbard
The Great Room
12.6. – 30.8.2026

How do you capture the inner life of a person whose reality no longer aligns with the outer world? And how do you remain in relation to someone who is both intimately familiar and irreversibly changing?

Katherine Hubbard began her five-year project The Great Room in 2020, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when her mother, Antonette Berger, became increasingly unwell and the artist became her primary caretaker. It took several months in a time of anxiety and isolation until Berger was diagnosed with LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy), a form of dementia. Hubbard has described this diagnosis as both necessary and insufficient: a gesture towards control and classification that ultimately fails to grasp the lived, shifting reality of her mother’s condition. It is precisely this gap that the project inhabits. More

Katherine Hubbard (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1981) considers analog photography as a mimesis of the body and asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs the positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time-based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, harnessing the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking. Hubbard is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in photography and received her MFA in 2010 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is Associate Professor and MFA Photography Program Director at Pratt Institute, School of Art in Brooklyn, NY.

Solo exhibitions include The great room, Company Gallery, New York (2023); Avoid glancing blows, Company Gallery, New York (2020); Katherine Hubbard, Higher Pictures, New York (2018); stages, Baxter St. Camera Club of New York, New York (2017); and Bring your own lights, The Kitchen, New York (2016). Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including Time Management Techniques, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Ecstatic Land, Marfa Ballroom, Texas; A Collection of Slow Events, The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; The Artist’s Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1. Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is included as part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sophie Thun (*1985, lives and works in Vienna) works primarily with analogue photography techniques, their spaces, processes and production and exhibition conditions. Thun grew up in Warsaw and completed her master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in both Vienna and Krakow. Thun has been a member of the board of the Secession since 2021, where she had a solo exhibition in 2020; from 2023 to 2025 she was interim professor of the photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since 2026, she has been Professor of Artistic Photography at the Institute of Fine Arts and Media Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr