Katherine Hubbard & Onyeka Igwe — Secession, opens June 11

• Indoor
• Photography
• Film
• Installation
• Contemporary art
• 1st district

Katherine Hubbard — The Great Room

Katherine Hubbard's The Great Room began in 2020, when her mother was diagnosed with dementia. The work is a five-year photographic project that uses her mother's apartment — a first-floor space in a Victorian house in Stone Ridge, New York — as its stage. What emerges is a series of encounters: two women moving through domestic space, rituals unfolding, the texture of care and disorientation held in the same frame.

The photographs are unflinching. Hubbard includes herself — often with tripod and camera visible — which serves two purposes at once. It renders transparent the act of image-making: we see the apparatus, the labour, the deliberation. But it also reads as an ethical gesture: a refusal to position her mother as subject alone, to leave her contained within the frame. The presence of the camera becomes a third body in the room.

The work has been developed in partnership with Studio Voltaire in London, where a further chapter will be presented from October 2026 onwards. This Secession presentation is the first major public showing.

Onyeka Igwe — No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame

Onyeka Igwe's practice begins with a question: what does an archive do when it is also a weapon? Her films and installations excavate the colonial archive not as a repository of knowledge but as a site of friction, opacity, and unresolved violence. She works with celluloid reels, visual records of past bureaucracies, abandoned spaces — materials that have been treated as inert, as history already settled.

What she does with these materials is not reconstruction. It is attunement. The work reactivates the archive as a historiography felt through the body, where colonial violence is not past tense but a persistent condition of the present. The title itself — No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame — suggests that some things cannot be recovered, only witnessed in their incompleteness.

Igwe is British-Nigerian, and her work emerges from and speaks to the experience of diaspora, of living with the weight of histories that official records suppress or distort.

The Secession

The building matters here. Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich and completed in 1897, the Secession is Vienna's most consistently interesting exhibition space for contemporary international art. It was built as a manifesto — a space where artists could present work without the constraints of the academy or the salon. That mission has held. The building is austere, geometric, almost brutalist in its clarity. The dome is covered in golden laurel leaves. It reads as both monument and working studio.

The double exhibition runs from June 11 to August 30. The vernissage is at 19:00 on June 11. Admission is €5.