The art historian and curator Luisa Ziaja takes a look at the highly referential creative work of Peles Empire in her lecture “Between Trompe l’oeil and the Digital Glitch: On the Postdigital and Paracuratorial Strategies of Peles Empire.” The Berlin-based art duo operates with a great fondness for the in-between: through a descriptive stroke of approximation, this in-between might be described as a transfer and re-transfer between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional, between space and surface, or as a process of translation between various media, between object and likeness, reality and illusion, but also history and the present day, and not least as agency related to the artwork and the beholder. Based on the space-encompassing and space-creating installation at the Künstlerhaus, the lecture traces the different strategies and their origins in the artistic, mediatic, and curatorial field.

Mag. Luisa Ziaja (*1976 Opole, lives in Vienna) is an art historian, writer, and curator. She has been curator for contemporary art at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna since 2013 and co-director of the postgraduate program in exhibition theory and practice ecm – educating/curating/managing at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2006. She was a lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts, Technical University Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Vienna Artschool and is on the board of the discursive platform schnittpunkt – exhibition theory & practice. In her curatorial and discursive practice, she deals with the relations between contemporary art, society, and politics (of history), as well as with the histories and theories of exhibiting. She is the author and co-editor of numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies on contemporary art, curating, and art and exhibition theory, among others the publishing series curating: exhibition theory & practice (Berlin and Boston: Edition Angewandte / de Gruyter) and Handbuch: Ausstellungstheorie und -praxis (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau/UTB, 2013). Recent curatorial projects include: On the New: Young Scenes in Vienna (2019, with Severin Dünser), Joint Ventures: A Public Program on the Relevance of 1968 in the Present Day, Christian Philipp Müller: Family of Austrians, and Anna Witt: Human Flag (2018).