Margins of the Visible
curated by: Mia Milgrom
artists: Nanna Kaiser, Lotti Brockmann & Paul Schurich, Janne Charlotte Schipper & Andreas Sahl Andersen, Pille-Riin Jaik, Julian Berger, Anastasiia Lisnycha, Lucie Vrbíková, Jakub Kempný, Omar El Sadek & Hanne Kaunicnik, Jesse Van Epenhuijsen, Renata Jelínková
30.9. 2025 - 30.1. 2026
Organized in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the Austrian Cultural Forum Prague, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and BMWKMS (Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport, Republic of Austria)
Margins of the Visible gathers international artists from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna who interrogate the layered relationships between architecture, infrastructure, and organic life—placing at the center the blurred thresholds between human and non-human, interior and exterior, built and natural. Bringing together diverse perspectives in architecture, sculpture and video, the exhibition proposes a deeper attentiveness to changing landscapes and cityscapes, to what remains, what has been lost and what is still coming into being. Margins of the Visible forms two exhibitions separated in space, but connected through conceptual proximity and acting as extensions of each other, fluidly juxtaposing works that appear in one or both of the spaces merging diverse media and approaches into a unified whole.
The artists in this exhibition probe the politics of space—how societal structures, labor systems, and histories are
inscribed into the urban fabric. Through art works and texts which are assembled in this accompanying booklet, we are invited to sites of disorder and ambiguity, the margins of the city, post-industrial ruins, infrastructural gaps as well as housing and monuments—spaces often dismissed or overlooked, but rich in their ability to register and memorize impact. Coalescing around infrastructures and technologies both as things and relationships between things, the exhibited works question instability and distortion, acting as holders of potentiality, a force between crisis and regeneration. As Aldo Rossi has stated, "the emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings"1. Our surrounding scapes and architecture are never static, but dynamic participants in the ecologies they house and shape. A city is not a mere collection of functional objects but a living repository of collective memory, a digestive system with its own microbiome. In the context of global crises and wars, the topic of spatial politics is as urgent as ever—we are witnessing large scale displacements, not only as the removal of people from a place, but perhaps just as significantly the removal of a place itself. Between annihilation, damaged ecologies, and the transformation and commodification of land, we need to reimagine a shared future and our place in it.
Édouard Glissant's "one-world"(tout monde) is composed of and enables a relation between different people and places, visible and invisible forces, assembling the dissimilar. Opposing the discourse of the same and the other, his vision surpasses binarity in favor of fluidity, relying on intuition and poetry to make sense of the world. In this sense, Margins of the Visible attempts to reconcile our imaginations of spaces, bringing forward the edges and perimeters, the hidden and misaligned. It builds on blocks of reciprocity and playfulness and at the heart of it lies the idea of cathedral thinking—a long-view approach that resists short-term gain in favor of generational stewardship. Like the medieval builders of cathedrals who laid stones for descendants they would never meet, the artists here offer gestures toward futures they may never see: speculative architectures, slow ecologies, and counter-models to extractive, homogenized urbanism. We are invited to play with what is complicated or unnecessary, overgrown and contaminated, flourishing as well as decaying.