Active Rest
We’ve had a quieter start to 2026. With the year of the Fire Horse ahead, it’s time to catch up and come together.
Next Thursday in Vienna we begin with an especially inviting exhibition, Active Rest: An Exploration of Time, curated by Sara Alavi Kia. The exhibition brings together a vibrant group of artists working with painting, wall objects (and anesthesia), photography (and AI), textile, sound, light, and scent. Sara puts it beautifully:
In a culture shaped by acceleration and constant productivity, rest is often framed as absence, as a pause between moments of activity. Active Rest challenges this notion by presenting rest as a state of presence, attention, and engagement. To rest, in this context, is not to withdraw from experience, but to attune oneself differently: to allow other rhythms, senses, and modes of knowing to surface.
Signal ist da!
Six years ago in midtown Manhattan, Tan Mu came into her studio everyday to paint some dots. One small set after another, it became No Signal. The painting refers to the familiar image for those of us growing up with bulky CRT televisions: the snowy screen accompanied by the hiss of white noise. It also refers to the signal behind No Signal: a small fraction of that speckled image is in fact influenced by the cosmic microwave background. A whisper of the early universe. Now I’m reminded of the lecture about the first direct observation of gravitational waves I attended at Tsinghua ten years ago, on the remarkable endeavors of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) that confirmed a key prediction in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. That detected wave came from the collision of a pair of black holes. Then there’s the recent news of an AI’s counterintuitive design that seemed like “alien things or AI things” for the physicists at Caltech but could improve the sensitivity of LIGO by an estimated 10-15%, a leap at the sub-proton scale.
(Still) Tuning and a midsummer night’s strings
Elisabeth left us the strings from her June performance, Tuning. For several days, each time I passed the strings casually hanging beneath the balcony or next to the staircase, it felt as if the wall behind me stirred and the sound lingered. Then one day, when a gust blew the front door shut, the blonde horsehair of Carapacewhispered a complaint, and the gallery felt suddenly so quiet that the tension in this fluffy sculpture screamed for the strings to be activated again. Upstairs, the woven silver sculptures remain a soothing presence—for both humans and the architecture—as they always are.
A bureau for experiments?
I had little idea what Vienna had in store for me when I moved here for a PhD from New York’s quieter-than-usual Upper West Side during the pandemic, having impressed myself with an Expedia drone video on YouTube. One of the first people to hear the news was a stranger waiting next to me for take-away near Lincoln Center—probably a musician or a writer, starry-eyed: good for you! Then, like many friends I would come to know in Vienna, I just stayed. Vienna grows on you. And I want to bring one more slice of vibrancy to this city, celebrated as the world’s most livable, now in full bloom for its majestic spring. Praise the season.
Imaginary of an Image: On Tanmu’s Recent Paintings
At one moment I couldn’t help but stare at Tanmu’s Dolly the sheep. Among her intricately executed work, neither the composition nor the technique of Dolly was particularly remarkable, except that unlike most others, it gazes back.
It was then that I started examining the affective and epistemic formations in Tanmu’s work; my insensitivity was not because I knew little about her practice—from painting and drawing to printmaking and multimedia installations—or artistic approach, but that I had always felt genuinely close to the images, despite their objective guise.