Secession Podcast

Secession Podcast is a new digital series created by the Secession. In conversations with artists, curators, and experts, the podcast series provides interesting insights into the twelve to fifteen exhibitions of contemporary art that take place at the Secession every year. The program also features discussions on current issues as well as experimental sound formats and dialogues with members of the Association of Visual Artists, who share their personal recollections and reflect on the 125-year history of this unique artist-run institution.

Secession Podcast is a arts podcast hosted by Vienna Secession, with 87 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Vienna Secession hosts Secession Podcast, a arts show with 87 episodes published.

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  Episode #88

  Artists: Marianna Simnett in conversation with Bettina Spörr

  Aug 13, 202631 min

  Marianna Simnett shares insights into her conceptual thinking and the creative process behind her exhibition Circus at the Secession, a multimedia exhibition that brought together light, sound, and sculptural works drawing on her Yugoslav heritage. This episode was recorded on 6 March 2026, the day after the opening. Marianna Simnett Circus 6.3. – 31.5.2026 Personal references, including a work that was inspired by her Jewish-Croatian grandfather’s experience during the Holocaust, intersect with nods to folkloric bogeywomen, who may interchangeably figure as threat or ally, and the traditional Balkan skirt that stages the delicate play of revealing and concealing intimate body parts. The show’s Circus theme manifests itself in a variety of ways throughout the presentation: in the maniacal spinning of a skirt overhead, alluding to a circus tent; in a stage for a performance; in the sound of torturous laughter; or in dazzling lights illuminating a darkened space. Simnett’s practice consistently engages with intense corporeal states – urinating, fainting, the sensation of being tickled – which she taps into in an investigation of pleasure and pain. Having grown up in Great Britain as the daughter of a Croatian mother during the Yugoslav Wars, the artist remembers a recurring fantasy of a urinating figure resembling a folkloric female character who lifts her skirt to expose her genitalia to ward off evil spirits. Translated into neon lighting, this figure oscillates between provocation and defence, between abjection and agency. Neon does not merely illuminate; it intrudes. It screams, demands attention, and collapses distance. Building on the legacy of Bruce Nauman’s neon works, light in Simnett’s Fountain (2026) becomes a body in its own right – one that addresses, agitates, and physically affects the viewer. More Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) is a British-Croatian multidisciplinary artist living and working between Berlin and New York. Her immersive narratives centre around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care. Simnett’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Secession, Vienna (2026); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl (2026); Société, Berlin (2025, 2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2024); LAS, Berlin (2023); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Kunsthalle Zürich (2019); MMK, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018); The New Museum, New York (2018) and Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022); Espressioni: The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); and Prize of the Böttcherstraße, Kunsthalle Bremen (2022). Bettina Spörr is an art historian and has been a curator at the Secession since 2008. During this time, she has developed more than 60 solo exhibitions in close collaboration with artists and collectives of all generations and from across the globe, including exhibitions with Laura Owens, Francis Alÿs, Nicole Eisenman, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carlos Bunga, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Delaine Le Bas, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Francis Offman, June Crespo, Marianna Simnett, and Katherine Hubbard. Programmed by the board of the Secession. The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast. Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard Audio Editor: Paul Macheck Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr

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  Episode #87

  Artists: Katherine Hubbard in conversation with Sophie Thun

  Jul 23, 20261h 9m

  Artists Katherine Hubbard and Sophie Thun explore how Hubbard's work is positioned within queer feminist art and critically engages with the tradition of analogue photography. The conversation was recorded during the installation of the exhibition on 7 June 2026. Katherine Hubbard The Great Room 12.6. – 30.8.2026 How do you capture the inner life of a person whose reality no longer aligns with the outer world? And how do you remain in relation to someone who is both intimately familiar and irreversibly changing? Katherine Hubbard began her five-year project The Great Room in 2020, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when her mother, Antonette Berger, became increasingly unwell and the artist became her primary caretaker. It took several months in a time of anxiety and isolation until Berger was diagnosed with LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy), a form of dementia. Hubbard has described this diagnosis as both necessary and insufficient: a gesture towards control and classification that ultimately fails to grasp the lived, shifting reality of her mother’s condition. It is precisely this gap that the project inhabits. More Katherine Hubbard (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1981) considers analog photography as a mimesis of the body and asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs the positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time-based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, harnessing the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking. Hubbard is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in photography and received her MFA in 2010 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is Associate Professor and MFA Photography Program Director at Pratt Institute, School of Art in Brooklyn, NY. Solo exhibitions include The great room, Company Gallery, New York (2023); Avoid glancing blows, Company Gallery, New York (2020); Katherine Hubbard, Higher Pictures, New York (2018); stages, Baxter St. Camera Club of New York, New York (2017); and Bring your own lights, The Kitchen, New York (2016). Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including Time Management Techniques, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Ecstatic Land, Marfa Ballroom, Texas; A Collection of Slow Events, The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; The Artist’s Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1. Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is included as part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sophie Thun (*1985, lives and works in Vienna) works primarily with analogue photography techniques, their spaces, processes and production and exhibition conditions. Thun grew up in Warsaw and completed her master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in both Vienna and Krakow. Thun has been a member of the board of the Secession since 2021, where she had a solo exhibition in 2020; from 2023 to 2025 she was interim professor of the photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since 2026, she has been Professor of Artistic Photography at the Institute of Fine Arts and Media Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast. Programmed by the board of the Secession. Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard Audio Editor: Paul Macheck Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr

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  Episode #85

  Members: Sofie Thorsen, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, and Vanessa Joan Müller in conversation

  May 28, 202642 minS0

  <p>On the occasion of the exhibition Vienna–Copenhagen. Den Frie Udstilling 2026 at the artists’ association Den Frie in Copenhagen, the co-organisers Sofie Thorsen and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen talk with the art historian and curator Vanessa Joan Müller about, among other things, the model of the artists’ association, its historical roots, and the collaborative work and lively exchange leading up to the current exhibition.</p> <p>For the exhibition, the artists’ association Den Frie Udstilling invited their colleagues from the sister institution, Vienna Secession, to participate as guest exhibitors. 45 artists from Den Frie Udstilling present their work in dialogue with 125...

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  Episode #84

  Members: Peter Sandbichler im Gespräch mit Angela Stief

  May 15, 202634 minS0

  <p>Künstler und Secessionsmitglied Peter Sandbichler spricht mit Angela Stief (Direktorin der Albertina Modern), die seine Arbeit seit den frühen 2000er-Jahren intensiv begleitet und mehrfach mit ihm gearbeitet hat. Im Gespräch widmen sie sich Sandbichlers skulpturaler Praxis, die sich, wie Stief formuliert, „einer eindeutigen Kategorisierung entzieht“ und zugleich von einem tiefen Interesse an Architektur und öffentlichem Raum geprägt ist.</p> <p>Unter anderem spricht Sandbichler darüber, wie ihn Denken und Werk von Buckminster Fuller beeinflusst haben, sowie über sein Interesse an Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, die unmittelbare Begegnungen mit Kunst ermöglicht, große Sichtbarkeit schafft und di...

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  Episode #83

  Artists: Reba Maybury in conversation with Haris Giannouras

  Apr 30, 202647 minS0

  <p>Listen to Reba Maybury and curator Haris Giannouras talk about her new exhibition, about punk and labour, among other things. It was recorded on 4 March 2026, a day before the opening of Reba Maybury’s exhibition I Come in Peace.</p> <p>For her solo exhibition at Secession Maybury worked on a new body of work that engages directly with the misogynistic histories of the institution, confronting Klimt as a figure entrenched in privilege and power, a classical prototype of male artistic genius. In her practice the artist interrogates the intersections of feminism, sexuality, and power. Their discussion touches on th...

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