Zentrum
Fokus Forschung at the University of Applied Arts Vienna collaborates with the activities of the projects, facilitated by
Basak Senova, who is the project's outreach curator and a senior postdoc researcher at the university.The
exhibition features past moments and current work-in-progress by Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter in response to the philosophical
and scientific pursuit of their collaborators. Reflecting on recent projects in Austria, France, Benin and South Africa, the
artists will open up their studio to expose collaborative process, and welcome dialogue during the week of the 10-17 November
ending with an open studio afternoon.
Bronwyn Lace (1980,
Francistown, Botswana) earned her Fine Arts Degree (200X) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her artistic focus is
on the collaborative relationships between art and other fields, including physics, history, museology, philosophy and literature.
Site specificity, responsiveness and performativity are central to her practice. In 2016 Lace joined William Kentridge in
the founding and animating of the “Centre for the Less Good Idea” in Johannesburg, today Lace is the Centre’s steering force
and its international liaison arm. In 2020 Lace co-founded “The Zone”: a Vienna-based collective that inquires and curates
across the arts and sciences and beyond.
Marcus Neustetter (1976, Johannesburg,
South Africa) earned his undergraduate and Masters Degree in Fine Arts (2001) from the University of the Witwatersrand. As
an artist, he is interested in cross-disciplinary practice, site-specificity, socially engaged interventions and the intersection
of art and activism. Neustetter has produced projects, performances and installations across Africa, Europe, America and Asia
that search for a balance between poetic form and asking critical questions. As artistic director, facilitator, researcher
and strategist to various creative industry areas, he finds himself building opportunities and networks that develop interest
beyond his personal artistic practice into seeking alternatively cultural ecosystems as The Trinity Session in South Africa.
He is an adjunct professor at Nelson Mandela University.
Lace and Neustetter are based in Vienna.
Pushing
The Boundaries: Agency, Evolution, and The Dynamic Emergence of Expanding Possibilities is a transdisciplinary
project which employs a collaborative network of biologists, complexity scientists, and philosophers to establish conceptual
foundations on which we develop a novel modelling paradigm for evolving agential systems. Led by Johannes Jaeger and Tarja
Knuuttila, the project is hosted at the Dept of Philosophy of the University of Vienna and is funded by the John Templeton
Foundation.