You dissolve / It’s just another way you exist
Die Angewandte at Vienna Contemporary 2025
Dissolution
is not disappearance but a shifting, a dispersal, a survival in other forms. This exhibition gathers three artists, all graduates
of the TransArts department, whose works thematically explore the unstable space between presence and absence, remembering
and erasure, materiality and transformation, asking us to look closely at what dissolves but does not end, and to see how
traces endure in language, in space, and in form.
In Range
2C00-2C5F, Mariia Mihdieieva revives a forgotten script, transforming the Glagolitic alphabet into a
new typeface that slips between code and communication. Her work confronts the politics of legibility—who can be read, who
remains invisible—and reclaims space for voices at risk of dissolving into silence.
Maja Bojanić’s
Yours is the world in which I move uninvited traces the warmth of a body removed from the record books but not from
memory. Through an infrared lens, the absent figure of her great-grandmother, who was legally erased in 1992 during a state-sponsored
deletion of thousands of Slovenian residents from the permanent residency records, remains as a ghostly rhythm of life: as
a residue of touch, breath and movement that refuses to disappear.
In eternal 24/7, Katharina
Birkmann turns to the fragile figure of the snowman, a temporary being perpetually collapsing into water. Between
play and disappearance, ecology and culture, the snowman becomes a fragile monument—an emblem of how we mourn endings yet
still strive to hold them in place.
Read together, these three practices articulate dissolution as a generative
condition. Whether through scripts, bureaucratic erasures, or ephemeral figures, the works are to be understood as a rejection
of finality; they emphatically convey that what dissolves also has permanence.
The exhibition title quotes
the first line of the song You Dissolve, from the album Now We Can See by The Termals, 2009.
