#4 Modern People Baden
Modern People is a site-specific performance series based on manual algorithms and an attempt to read society as an organism. At its core are material excretions and waste products, which serve as indicators of the collective state of health—a process comparable to a coprological examination.
Elke Auer and Daniel Hafner embark on a search for physical and intellectual spaces. In a playful process, they place freely accessible material and immaterial resources into new social relationships, making these connections sensorially tangible. In doing so, Auer and Hafner not only engage with the act of finding and the potential of freely available resources, but also explore an openness to a permeable state in which objects and relationships can reveal themselves and become perceptible in the first place.
While the performance constitutes a form of attentional practice for the artists—one that offers care and attention to discarded, disposed of, lost, obsolete, or detached objects—the audience is invited to decipher these gestures of radical tenderness toward all that exists.
June 13, 2026, 5 p.m.
Performance
June 14, 2026, 5 p.m.
Performance
Followed by an artist talk, moderated by Katja Stecher.
Special thanks to The Greens of Lower Austria for their generous support of the project.
born in Graz in 1980, studied Visual Media Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since 2005, she has worked as an independent artist as well as a video artist and stage designer for theatre productions.
In her artistic practice, she engages with feminist, emancipatory, and class-queer theories, exploring the political dimensions of contemporary constructions of identity and ways of living. Her work incorporates found materials, language, and motifs drawn from (art) history. Her projects of recent years have addressed reproductive labour, vulnerability and shame, popular culture and hip-hop, ideals and performance pressure, resistant tongues and leaking vessels, biopolitics and hormones, Neolithic gender imaginaries, as well as the tensions between contemporary feminisms and masculinities and their impact on political landscapes.
born in Deutschlandsberg in 1979, studied Painting and Photography in Graz before continuing his studies in Digital Media and Art in Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Growing up in a former farmhouse near a forest, his early experiences of nature laid the foundation for an artistic practice shaped by modesty and a sensitive awareness of places and materials. While each of his works engages with a distinct materiality, drawing remains a central element of his practice, linking two-dimensional imagery with installations, video works, and performances. Hafner frequently works with found objects and manually developed algorithms. In his performances, he explores the tensions between material scarcity and abundance, as well as the value systems that underpin social coexistence.