Exhibition Opening: 17th October, at 4PM
Duration: 17 October - 25 October, 2025
Talk/Public Presentation: 21st October at 6PM
Finissage: 25th October, 2025 at 3PM
Opening times: 3-7pm, Thursday - Saturday
At kuntsverein at 8B®1, Weiglgasse 8/B1/R1 – 1150 Vienna

Juca Fiis’ works begin with materials that seem far from tender: sandpaper, modular ceramics, industrial fragments. Yet through drawing, reshaping, and rearranging, these rigid surfaces are made porous, playful, and strangely intimate. Oil pastel smudges across grit, clay scribbles soften shapes, and forms emerge that resemble both tool and toy, heel and slide, crocodile and popcorn. The industrial is queered, detoured, turned into a playground.

Here, play isn’t just ornament; it’s a method. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott saw play as a “potential space” where imagination bridges our inner and outer worlds, letting courage, nonsense, and surprise flourish. He called these moments “transitional phenomena,” where interacting with an object can actually help us transform ourselves. Juca’s work brings this theory to life. In reshaping a slide that’s also a heel that’s also popcorn, nonsense becomes a guide, helping us trace the patterns of a dream we’ve long forgotten.

This spirit also ran through the workshop series Popcorn, Crocodiles and Ugly Flags, held with children from the Holzbauer Gemeindebau. Together, they celebrated “the courage of corn” as it burst into popcorn, imagined crocodiles sneaking into new landscapes, and designed ugly flags for the places they live in. These shared experiments created a collective space—half play, half practice—where kids and adults could transform objects, and maybe even themselves, along the way.

If Winnicott reminds us that play needs safety, Fanon reminds us that play also needs freedom: the chance to resist being cut into neat shapes by others’ expectations. Juca’s practice insists on this freedom. Each form disguises itself as something else, each object resists being final. Heavy materials dissolve into nonsense, and nonsense carries the promise of change.

So Winnicott’s purple rabbit, the crooked flag, the impossible slide—they all whisper the same truth: that real transformation happens in the in-between. It happens in play, in nonsense, and in that shared, potential space where imagination is finally allowed to take root.

The exhibition is a collaboration between QMA and kuntsverein Weiglgasse.

About the artist

Juca Fiis works with hybrids of art, architecture and education, and one of their favorite practices is to work in collaboration with children. They have participated in international residencies and educational programs, including documenta fifteen in Kassel, ART OMI in Hudson NY, Pivô in São Paulo, Fahrender Raum in Munich and at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. In Rio de Janeiro, they worked with the creation of educational programs of the Museum of Modern Art, as an education consultant for Museum of Tomorrow, and as a teacher and member of the educational board at the Visual Arts School of Parque Lage.