Group Exhibition REQUIEM Curated by ANYA HARRISON; 2026 — Galerie nächst St. Stephan

REQUIEMCurated by ANYA HARRISONon the occasion of curated by 2026_Love

Adam Christensen

Barbara Hammer

Mel Odom

Penny Goring

Upcoming Group Exhibition

Domgasse 6

1010 Vienna

15 Sept – 17 Oct 2026

REQUIEM

Heartbreak. Crèvecoeur. An amalgamation of two words becoming one, a compound stuck together, forever for all times. I’ve always been struck by this image of a heart, shattered into smithereens, the body’s compass no longer able (or unwilling?) to offer it its life-sustaining blood. The sensation of a neural pathway, an energy field deep inside exploding and rendered physical. Overwhelming, unbearable, intense, it is a pain that keeps on giving, a phantom limb irrevocably reminding of its absence.

No wonder that there are those who are scared shitless of loving.

Seventeen months I’ve pleaded

for you to come home.

Flung myself at the hangman’s feet.

Written in 1940 but not published until 1987 due to the controversy of the topics addressed, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem is an elegy about love, loss and suffering. Interweaving the micro and the macro, politics and current affairs with tales of personal, lived experience (in other words, forced disappearances and exile, those of her husband and son, but also that experienced by millions of others, strangers united by the same tragedy), Akhmatova unleashes a vortex of feelings, veering from grief, disbelief, mourning and resolve. Yet read anew, this series of poems could be a testament to love and its double. For love, if not Janus-faced, is inherently double-edged, indissociable from loss, fear and pain. It is a risk that requires nerves of steel. To love is to give oneself over to the premise of death. How far are you willing to go?

Consider the multimedia works of Penny Goring, saturated with a constellation of emotions and affects that society deems ‘negative’ – anger, sadness, shame, trauma, addiction, despair, terror – and which often stem from the artist’s own lived experiences. In the ongoing Amelia series, begun in 2017, the paintings wear their heart on their (paper) sleeve. They are fairytale compositions featuring the artist and her ex-lover Amelia, who died from a heroin overdose, as fragile-looking twin avatars – interchangeable, dead and alive, capable of equal parts self-destruction, violence and loving. Rendered with a knowingly feigned naivety and an undercurrent of dark humour, Goring plunges us into an ambiguous universe of severed limbs, cartoon-shaped hearts, thorns and fangs, shit-stained tears, and that ubiquitous red. The same bloody crimson that appears, for example, on Cherry Red Double Forever Doll (2023), the figure almost cutesy were it not for the fact that it is decapitated. No head, no thought, just feeling and body, for ever, murder in my heart, love <3 in my hands, incised with hand stitches along its torso and comically elongated, dangling legs.

Mel Odom’s otherworldly, highly stylised illustrations were initially created to grace the covers and pages of adult magazines, appearing from the second half of the 1970s onwards in Viva, Playboy, Blueboy, and the like. What is instantly palpable in these tender drawings of queer love and desire, emanating a certain cinematographic quality, a pre-Raphaelite and fin-de-siècle aura, is the tenderness with which the lines, curves, shading and colour washes have been applied to paper. It is easy to forget that many of Odom’s earlier pieces were produced at the height of the AIDS crisis. Viewed through this lens, they are an ode, homage, love letter to loved ones, many of them since gone, a secret sign language veiled beneath the relative safety of a commercial order for all to see, but only for a select few to understand. An extreme form of beauty to return dignity to and counter the demonisation of those lost to something much greater. Fast forward to the present and the drawings created by Odom during another, more recent global epidemic – Covid – attest to a similar feeling of bonjour tristesse, youthful faces tinged with hazard signs, assemblages of mechanical body parts ready to be torn apart in a crash test.

Adam Christensen stages intimate scenes in which the most banal occurrences become an enticing narrative – an often-dramatic language with explicit, tragicomic content drawn from memories of late-night parties or cruising – that mingles autobiography with fantasy. Handstitched memories floating weightlessly on textile curtains, anonymous faces and silhouettes, their mouths gaping wide open; or painted with nail varnish on to mirrors, windows and other transparent or reflective grounds. Christensen’s testimony of fleeting encounters, unrequited love and broken hearts often bleeds into his performances, moments of pure grace during which the artist proffers spoken-word texts and love songs while accompanying himself on an accordion. However, in addition to this youthful angst, there is now an added weight, the loss in recent years of Christensen’s mothers, the physical scars, and what remains, from that wrenching separation.

Perhaps a less agonising requiem, although one not necessarily less difficult to enact, can be located in the early videos of Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). In Death of a Marriage (1969), Hammer captures on film just that, the collapse – or, to be more accurate, the symbolic death – of her marriage, and with it everything that a stable partnership (with a man) ought to offer: a home in the woods, a horse corral built together, even an art studio. Yet, an alternative lifestyle, even a supposedly Edenic, idyllic one, is not enough to do away with the feelings of entrapment caused by playing proscribed roles in the theatre of heteronormativity. What we witness is a shedding of skins, a sacrificial performance necessary to kill off an old, imposed way of life, before arriving at a new threshold, the celebration of lesbian love, sexuality and identity that Hammer became celebrated for.

Requiem is not about death, per se, but it is about the risks one is willing to take for love, a radical love, one that is often situated outside of traditional socially validated institutions. It speaks to how painful and solitary the feeling and experience of loving can be. And how it’s so worth it, despite, even maybe because of, the pain.

—

Anya Harrison

www.curatedby.at

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