QMA Artist Collective 2025
April-November 2025
The Participating Artists
Laura Sofia Oyuela Flores working with Michael Reindel
Juca Fiis working with Bassano Bonelli Bassano
Sattva Giacosa working with Dunia Sahir
So Young Park working with Isabelle Edi
Jiun-You Ou working with İklim Doğan
Ana Mikadze working with Yehor Antsyhin and Aurelia van Kempen
The Curators
This year’s curatorial team is being led by Ale Zapata and
includes two external curators: Eva Kovač and Andrea Popelka.
Ale Zapata
Ale Zapata is a Mexican curator, cultural worker, and visual designer based in Vienna. Her work focuses on exploring gender discourse and identity, with a curatorial journey that has been largely self-taught and shaped by over a decade of immersive experience. Ale’s practice emphasizes care-driven methodologies and non-hierarchical structures, striving to foster inclusive and collaborative environments
Eva Kovač
Eva Kovač is an art historian and curator based in Vienna. Since January 2024, together with her colleagues from Blockfrei Collective she has been leading the artistic direction and curatorial program of DAS WEISSE HAUS, an association and independent art institution in Vienna. Her research focuses on performance, the interplay of tradition and technology, art financialization, nationalism, and antinationalism (particularly in Central and Southeast European contexts).
Photo credit: © Uroš Miloradović
Andrea Popelka
Andrea Popelka is a curator, researcher, and body worker based in Vienna and Berlin. She is broadly concerned with the relationship between art and politics, taking a materialist approach. Popelka craves a critical and stimulating exhibition making that adequately corresponds to the present and its implications in history. Currently, she is working closely with the artist directors of Skulpturprojekte Münster on the realisation of its 2027 edition.
Photo credit: © Julia Gaisbacher
The Jury
The artists selected by an external jury comprised of Brooklyn J. Pakathi and Frederike Sperling,
together with this year’s curators Ale Zapata, Eva Kovač and Andrea Popelka.
Brooklyn J. Pakathi
Brooklyn J. Pakathi (They/Them) is an independent curator and cultural producer. Their curatorial work is shaped by an interest in decolonial curatorial practices and a search for alternative curatorial strategies that can be used to embed cultural equity. Brooklyn works in actioning cultures of technology, developing inclusive and alternative definitions of the technological and using virtual space to deploy artistic practice and discourse outside of the modern colonial world system.
Pakathi is also a media artist with an ongoing studio practice in Vienna. Much of their most recent work concerns itself with the language and materiality of emotion. Sentimental longing, melancholy, and various other configurations of intimacy affirm their practice. The Vienna-based artist/curator constructs objects, images and virtual spaces to connect and abstract the underlying architecture of these profound and complex psychological forces.
Frederike Sperling
Frederike Sperling is the artistic director at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich in Vienna. In this role, she has worked on new commissions, performative exhibitions, live and discursive events with OMSK Social Club, Deva Schubert, P. Staff, Sophie Utikal, among others. In the past, she was head of programming at das weisse haus and a curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21). Before, she was curatorially involved at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Melly Institute, Rotterdam. In addition to serving on juries and teaching, she regularly contributes to art magazines and artistic publications. She studied art history and curating at the University of Amsterdam and Goldsmiths, University of London
(c) Portraitstudio Wien - Theresa Wey
Holding, Becoming
Group show
November 26 -29, 2025
Artists: Ana Mikadze, Juca Fiis, Yehor Antsyhin, Sattva Giacosa, So Young Park, Jiun-You Ou, Dunia Sahir, İklim Doğan, Isabelle Edi, Laura Sofia Oyuela Flores, Bassano Bonelli Bassano, Michael Reindel, Aurelia van Kempen
Curators: Andrea Popelka, Eva Kovač and Ale Zapata
Location: Gallery AG18, Annagasse 18, 1010 Vienna
Beginning with a desire to make sense of remembering, this exhibition evolves from a durable collective process. Here, memory unfolds as a relational field, where the subjective, the intimate, and the collective are intertwined, just as what truly happened blends with what we imagine to have taken place.
The exhibition seeks to make sense of a present in crisis by searching for anchors in the past. Where are we going? What pathways between life and death, between ancestry and the present, can be found? Caught in the limbo of loss and recollection, between forgetting and holding on, memory reveals its bittersweet nature. Engaging with it can be unsettling and painful, as our memories trace the contours of our lives and experiences, and make us feel the fleeting nature of time itself.
Find more information on the exhibition and the accompanying program here.
Photos by Miloš Vučićević
The Impossible Slide
Solo Show by Juca Fiis
October 17 - 25, 2025
Curators: Ale Zapata, Guilherme Maggessi
Location: 8B®1, Weiglgasse 8/B1/R1 – 1150 Vienna
A collaboration between QMA and kuntsverein at 8B®1
Juca Fiis transforms rough materials, sandpaper, ceramics, and industrial fragments, into forms that feel playful, porous, and strangely intimate. A slide becomes a heel, a tool turns into a toy, and nonsense opens space for transformation.
The exhibition also draws from the workshop series ‘Popcorn, Crocodiles and Ugly Flags’, created with children from the Holzbauer Gemeindebau, where shared experiments turned everyday objects into collective acts of play and imagination.
Find more information on the exhibition and the accompanying program here.
Photos by Miloš Vučićević
A stone is a stone is a stone (II)
Solo show by OU Jiun-You (歐軍佑)
June 1 - July 6, 2025
Curator: Ale Zapata
Location: Brunnenpassage (Brunnengasse 71, 1160 Vienna)
A collaboration between QMA and Brunnenpassage
As an artist who has worked intensively with stone, OU Jiun-You was often confronted with the problem of transporting large or heavy works during her nomadic life in Europe. When storage and transport solutions were once again unavailable in the fall of 2023, she decided to dismantle a large block of marble during her “room in residence” at the Semmelweisklinik Clinic Art Center. What is now presented in the vitrina is an almost mundane presence, marked by quiet moments and the simple fact of being perceived. Loose fragments are brought to rest, the stone mound tilts into its angle of rest(*)—that subtle stability in which weight, time, and gravity pause for a moment. Resting on a circular platform raised by two poles, the fragmented stones are held not as rubble, but as if on a sacred support—a silent procession of matter and memory.
(*) The angle of repose is the steepest angle at which a material remains stable without slipping, and is determined by friction, cohesion, and gravity.
Find more information on the exhibition here.
Photos by OU Jiun-You (歐軍佑)
Accumulation(s) /
Anhäufung(en)
Solo Show by Ana Mikadze
December 12, 2025 - January 16, 2026
Curators: Ale Zapata, Guilherme Maggessi
Location: 8B®1, Weiglgasse 8/B1/R1 – 1150 Vienna
A collaboration between QMA and kuntsverein at 8B®1
What do you do when you inherit absence? When that absence is visceral, undeniable - yet refuses to take form?
In Accumulation(s), Ana Mikadze traces what they call technologies of survival: the residues of familial memory, legible only through their erasure. This is not a search for what endures, but an inquiry into the fragments gathered when memory must be reassembled rather than received.
The exhibition unfolds across affective and material inheritances, moving between personal narrative and larger historical entanglements. It is an offering not to the past as it was, but to the impossibility of its retrieval, an offering of the irrecoverable, articulated through the material vocabularies that were never passed down.
Find more information on the exhibition and the accompanying program here.
Photos by Miloš Vučićević