After the last ready-made

Artists:Danilo Andrés, Atabey (formerly Carlos Maria Romero), Feminist* Bloco Descolonial, Zosia Hołubowska, Otto Krause & Milan Loviška, Nina Sandino, Kia Sciarrone, Anita Steinwidder

Curated byDorian BonelliandFrederik Marroquín

“after the last ready-made”is an exhibition taking place as part of the “Synergies of Solidarity” community festival organized by Queer Art Spaces Vienna. 
Rather than being part of a predetermined identity, queerness is understood here as a strategy for confronting the upheavals of our time through artistic and solidarity-based concepts from the community. Festival Management and Direction, Queer Art Spaces Vienna: Michael Kaufmann and Jasmin Hagendorfer

The readymade once stood for a radical gesture: the moment when an industrially (pre)manufactured everyday object, removed from its original context, could be designated as art and reimagined. A century later, the logic of the readymade has once again reversed into its original opposite. Our clothing, our identities, and even our desires are presented as standardized, readily available, ubiquitous, and endlessly interchangeable commodities.

“after the last ready–made”brings together queer artists who, through their work with textiles and garments as well as their engagement with materials, question this state of affairs. Our clothing is where bodies, industry, and self-presentation converge. It marks one of the most intimate intersections between mass production and personal identity.

In the age of fast fashion, the production of clothing is shaped by global systems of resource depletion and waste disposal, as well as by mechanisms of exploitation. As a counterpoint to this regime of prefabricated identities and commodification, the works in this exhibition stand for slowing down, sharing, repairing, and transforming oneself. 

In queer practice, identity has long been understood not as something given, but as something made—it emerges through improvisation, transformation, and constant renegotiation. Seen in this light, the exhibition does not simply declare the end ofthe ready-made object. It asks what comes next: when bodies resist standardized forms, when materials are reworked rather than consumed, when fashion shifts from a disposable product to a space of collective imagination, and when our self-chosen second skin regains its sensitivity.
 

Supported bythe Alsergrund District,WASt, the Vienna Anti-Discrimination Office for LGBTIQ Affairs,ÖH University of Vienna, andKultur Alsergrund.
Supported bySchlumberger.