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.
