crawling home
5 July - 29 August

Participants: Beverley Duckworth, Carli Fridolin Biller, Dora Fiammetta Perini, Emilia Auersperg, EmmaSarpaniemi, Hannah Neckel, Julia Belova, Lili Theilen, Madita Kloss, Matilde Wall & MilagroChinaglia, Max Freund, Rosa Schurian-Stanzl, Skyhoje

 

Crawling Home as an exhibition functions almost like an in-between space, a temporary site of arrival, searching, disassembling, and reassembling. For two months, we – Madelaine, Emilia, and Sophie  – will inhabit Imbergstraße 51–55 with the aim of making young contemporary positions visible and showing Salzburg beyond its baroque

postcard aesthetics (despite selling postcards).

At the center is the idea of home as a fluid state: not fixed, not complete, but fragile, negotiable, and physically perceptible. The participating artists approach the theme through different perspectives – the fragmentary, the poetic, and the personal. The focus is on works that explore the body as a bearer of identity and home.

Dora Fiammetta Perini (*1995, lives and works in Italy) shows in her photographic-installative work pass me a beer hun (2025) the precarious threshold between intimacy and publicity. Her sculptural objects generate psychological tension, similar to the anticipation before returning to a familiar place.

 

Moving in a similar direction is Emma Sarpaniemi (*1993, lives and works in Helsinki). Her photographs, often laced with subtle humor and baroque artificiality, shift the boundaries between posing, play, and self- assertion. Imaginative props and carefully composed images create spaces where staging becomes a strategy of emancipation – playful yet determined. Her works from the series Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower use self-portraiture as a stage for performative identity constructions.

 

Lili Theilen (*1998, lives and works in Berlin) extends this approach: the body is protected, shaped, and at the same time questioned – a play with visibility and belonging. By applying several layers of diluted paint, the impression arises as if material were being removed as much as built up. The forms seem lifeless and out of place; motifs such as faces without expression and human figures without personhood appear isolated in a directionless vacuum. Between textile, painting, and object, Theilen negotiates visibility and belonging. Her work gropes at the boundary between body, shell, and space.

The works of Carli Fridolin Biller (they/them) also engage with corporeality. A comic-like figure accompanies Carli and is repeatedly portrayed – a constantly changing character that visually negotiates queer identity, emotion, and self-observation. Carli’s intuitive painting style reflects the closeness between inner state and painterly expression, making the body itself

a projection surface for a shifting self. The self as home – and as reflection of a state?

The materiality of home itself also comes into play. Emilia Auersperg (*1999, lives and works between London and Attersee) transforms found everyday objects into fragile sculptures that pose questions of consumption, value, and emotional attachment. Influenced by the intricacies of her homeland at Attersee,

wondrous worlds of questioning and new arrivals emerge.

 

Beverley Duckworth (lives and works in London) uses living materials – such as compost – to make cycles of decay and regeneration visible. In her work Spoil she highlights the momentariness of existence and the brief presence of humankind – as well as everything we have created.

In Rosa Schurian-Stanzel’s textile installation 4 zu 3 (2025) crawling itself becomes a physically tangible
moment: the audience encounters the work at knee height, in a gesture of

vulnerability and childlike curiosity.

In Ceramic Tears (2025), Matilde Wall (*2000, lives and works in Berlin) and Milagro Chinaglia (*1998,
lives and works in Berlin/Milan) connect memory, loss, and ritual transformation with poetic reflection.

Their clay tears become stone witnesses of pain, guilt, and collective grief  – fragile monuments between resignation and hope. Their joint video installation also plays with body, space, and the vulnerability of existence, especially in a female body.

Julia Belova (*1991, lives and works in Vienna) likewise draws on cultural and religious symbols. She transforms baroque iconography into a queer-feminist direction, rethinking the body as a resistant space of ritual self-transformation.

 

Skyhoje (*1999, lives and works in Berlin and Luxembourg), on the other hand, interweaves film stills, photography, and ceramics into dreamlike images in which memory and the subconscious overlap. Despite a certain two-dimensionality, her stills – as well as the video installation A Shameful Tale of Imaginary People (2025) – possess a corporeality and atmosphere that feels almost tangible: something like a physical discomfort and a tentative touching of boundaries.

 

At the same time, her work celebrates the independence of the female figure and her expressive power. The question of staging and identity also appears in the works of Max Freund (*1992, lives and works in Vienna) and Madita Kloss (*1988, lives and works in Vienna): Freund’s pictorial spaces assemble art, pop, and subculture in kaleidoscopic overlays. Here, identity appears as an open, permeable system. With regard to Salzburg in particular, Freund engages with works by both local and internationally enowned authors – among them Stefan Zweig. Kloss’ monumental painting  Das Erzbitchtum (2025), conceived specifically for the exhibition, combines art historical references with feminine power and irony – a visual reflection on power, spirituality, and self-assertion. The work is a feminist allusion to the “bishop’s city” of Salzburg.

Crawling Home offers no clear answer to the questions of homecoming and how we as humans process this feeling. Instead, the exhibition opens up a space of in-betweenness – poetic, vulnerable, personal. It asks: How can we imagine home when it is no longer bound to nation, origin, or ownership? Perhaps it is precisely this crawling – the careful, bodily groping – that enables us to understand home as a relationship. Perhaps through these questions we find our way to ourselves, to each other, to the world – and begin to develop more empathy for our fellow human beings.

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