Your solo exhibition ‚calorie‘ is curated by Susanne Watzenboeck. You’ve realized so many projects in very different contexts, institutions, and public spaces, so I’m curious how this specific collaboration at the OK Linz came about.
The whole process and planning already started almost two years ago. I was invited and asked to develop a project in Linz. At that point, it wasn’t specifically the OK Linz space that was offered to me; it was another venue within the larger museum conglomerate in Linz.
Eventually, it turned out that the project would take place at OK Linz. At first, I found the space quite challenging. It’s not a white cube at all; the space consists of multiple rooms and is located in a former school building. When you enter, you immediately feel the history of the place. I’m not sure whether it used to be a girls‘ school or a mixed school, but that fact and school-like architecture are very present in the space even today.
This pushed me to develop a concept that could respond to both the architecture and the history of the space. I’ve been working with the topic of energy for over a decade now, and heat is something I wanted to revisit and concentrate my exhibition on. Quite suddenly, this particular project aligned perfectly with the spatial possibilities of OK Linz. Certain things you simply cannot do in a newly built museum with strict climate control systems. Here, the existing infrastructure, especially the heating system, became an opportunity to work directly with what was already there. As the OK offers a lot of space, Susanne Watzenböck’s concept was to show already existing works like „galatean heritage“ and „the kitchen..“ emphasizing the feminist focus, alongside the new production „calorie“.
I must say the exhibition was for me not only about heat or warmth. I also sensed the concepts of measurement and gradation. The lengthy curtains, different scales of the works, and the wall pieces in relation to the spatial installations. It felt like a system of calibration. I think this connects strongly to discourses around temperature and how it’s measured, regulated, and standardized. Would you agree?
Absolutely, while developing the exhibition, I went very deeply into the question of what temperature actually is and what kind of system it represents.
The more I researched, the clearer it became how universal and influential temperature is in our lives. It governs our existence in ways we mostly don’t consciously notice. Temperature is also a brutally political and hierarchical system. There’s a gendered aspect to it, a racial aspect, an economic one, and of course a climate-related dimension. It operates globally, and even beyond that, on a cosmic scale, if you think about the sun as the fundamental source of heat that makes life possible.
Working with something so fundamental is very humbling. You realize how small your own intervention is—just a fraction of a much larger system. For me, this exhibition also feels like a beginning rather than a conclusion.
How did these ideas translate into your material choices? What materials did you work with, and why?
The sculptural interventions are primarily made from copper. Traditionally, heating systems used copper pipes, at least until more composite and plastic-based materials became common over the last two decades. I used copper piping to directly connect the sculptures to the building’s heating system. The sculptures themselves are also constructed from copper because it’s an excellent heat conductor. It absorbs the heat from the water circulating through the pipes and distributes it efficiently.
There are different types of heating: convection heating, which warms the air, and radiant heating, which requires a body to absorb the heat directly. I wanted to shift from convection to radiation, to allow visitors to physically feel the warmth, similar to sitting near a fireplace. To make that possible, I filled the spaces between the copper structures with clay mixed with straw. Clay is a very traditional material, historically used for building stoves and furnaces. Recently, it has been rediscovered as an ecological alternative to concrete or brick. It’s down-to-earth, inexpensive, easy to handle, and almost the opposite of copper. Copper is mined, extracted, and industrial; clay can literally come from your backyard. That contrast was very important to me, and I want to underline it.
What about the floor base that is also connected to heating pipes? It felt like a surface or outline referencing a room plan in a very broad sense?
That element refers to underfloor heating systems. It’s a kind of diagram or abstraction of how heating pipes run beneath living spaces. The rectangular shape can be read as a symbolic living area, a base for a house, or a shelter. Something that holds warmth, that protects.
You mentioned earlier the gendered aspects of heat. More generally, your practice is often read through a feminist lens. Would you say that care plays a central role in this exhibition? Especially considering ideas of home, shelter, warmth, and bodily experience?
Very much so. Creating a safe environment is deeply connected to care, to keeping something alive, sustaining it. But I’m also interested in addressing care through a technological lens.
Care is often associated with so-called “soft skills” and domestic labor, which are still largely gendered. Yet the environments in which care takes place are highly technical. That’s why I included the kitchen in the exhibition. It contains some of the most powerful and potentially dangerous devices we live with daily, and it’s historically associated with unpaid female labor.
I wanted to emphasize this technological aspect of care: how sustaining life and managing warmth, water, food, and climate rely on complex systems. In the context of climate change, these technologies become even more visible and necessary to provide cooling, heating, water, and livable spaces. I’m not framing this as good or bad, but rather as something that needs to be visible, discussed, and questioned.
So there’s also a strong element of making invisible systems visible.
Exactly. Heating systems are usually designed to disappear, to be hidden in walls, floors, and radiators that blend in. With this project, I wanted the heating system to emancipate itself, to take up space, and to become a sculptural presence. Instead of serving quietly in the background, it becomes something you consciously encounter: physically, socially, and politically.
These systems are meant to serve but not be visible, almost as if they have no rights of their own. So you are giving space to something that historically never had space, which also resonates strongly with unpaid female labor.
I see technological structures very much as metaphors for unseen people or unseen labor structures. Essential things, constantly working, but socially ignored. For me, it’s easier to speak from that angle: using technology as a stand-in for bodies, labor, and care that remain unacknowledged.
I’d like to talk about another work in the exhibition: the piece with the thread and the knitting machine. It’s an older work, right?
Yes, the work is called ‘Galatean Heritage.’ I was very happy to include both older and newer works in the exhibition because it makes visible that this feminist thread runs through my practice consistently.
This piece deals with reproduction. I was interested in contrasting what is often framed as female reproduction—bearing children and biological continuity—with a more traditionally male notion of reproduction: building things, creating monuments, leaving traces meant to last forever, and even attempting to technically reproduce the human being through science and engineering.
The title refers to the myth of Galatea from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She was created by a sculptor who fell in love with his own creation. In a way, she could be understood as one of the earliest “androids,” an artificially made human figure that comes to life. This idea has been with us since antiquity. In the installation, the knitting machine produces a textile object during the exhibition.
Knitting is traditionally coded as female labor; the material is wool, something organic and taken from an animal. The machine “reproduces” an object that could be read as an organism.
I outsource reproduction: I build a machine that produces something living-like, rather than producing a body myself. For me, this was a way to wedge something in between the binary options. To say: you’re not limited to one form of reproduction or one socially assigned role. You can combine, shift, or reject these frameworks altogether.
Your work “habaï ne sï natena, se paï tanïmena (2023)” is a light installation at Museum Quartier in Vienna. It has become so integrated into the architecture that it almost disappears into everyday life. Would you say that the newly produced works in Linz could also function in public space? How important is this inside–outside relationship for you?
That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I’m very interested in creating systems for outdoor or public spaces, but they need to be more durable, which would mean adapting materials and construction. I’m particularly interested in connecting interior systems with exterior realities: for example, thinking about heated, habitable spaces for homeless people in winter. That’s something cities should take responsibility for. But projects like that require long-term collaboration with institutions, municipalities, and technical infrastructures. You can’t just build something in your studio and place it outside. Sometimes ideas take ten or twenty years until the right opportunity emerges. Working with architecture and urban infrastructure is slow, but I’m definitely interested in that direction.
Your practice functions in galleries and institutions; you’re represented by Gallery Hubert Winter, but it also clearly operates in public; it has this social dimension.
I’m very interested in being part of society beyond the art context. I want to create works for people, not only for an art audience. For me, it’s important that people can interact with the work, enjoy it, use it, participate in it, or even be annoyed by it.
Could you give an example of how participation works in your practice?
Participation doesn’t always mean that people have to actively “do” something. In the OK Linz exhibition, for example, visitors are invited to feel the warmth. In museums, touching artworks is usually forbidden, but during the opening, people did touch the sculptures, and I didn’t mind. I don’t announce it explicitly, but the works are meant to be experienced bodily. People should navigate the space with all their senses, not just visually. At the same time, I don’t want to force interaction. The works should be there, available, and open.
That’s interesting because your installation in the MQ work has become so embedded in its surroundings that it almost functions like a monument, part of the city’s infrastructure. You don’t necessarily perceive it as “an artwork” every time you see it; it’s just there.
Yes, I like that idea, that the work integrates itself, puts down roots, and becomes part of reality rather than constantly demanding attention.
What about the thermal images and prints in the exhibition?
The images are unchanged thermal photographs of human bodies, produced with a very expensive camera at the time. I treated the human body almost like raw material, using it to generate images that are difficult to read clearly. You’re never entirely sure what you’re seeing, which creates a moment of doubt. That doubt is something that still feels incredibly relevant today.
I developed that work in 2004 and first showed it in Paris in 2005. It deals with technical imaging, specifically thermal imaging, and how we interpret scientific or technological representations. I think it feels very current again today. With AI, media manipulation, and widespread mistrust in scientific data, the question of what images show us, and what we believe they show us, has become urgent again.
There’s also a scale or legend at the bottom that tells us which color corresponds to which temperature. Almost like a scientific key. Could you talk a bit more about that?
That scale is essential because it suggests objectivity and measurability. It tells you: this color equals this temperature. But at the same time, it raises more questions than it answers.
The work is titled ‘Stigmata,’ and it’s very much about how we charge bodies with meaning. We map differences onto bodies to separate them from what is considered “normal.”
There is racial profiling embedded in these technologies. They are used by the military for targeting, for border control, and for surveillance operations. These data are analyzed to classify, separate, and sometimes even eliminate people. There is a whole AI-driven and technological infrastructure behind this that I find deeply disturbing. This work is an early one, and initially it referred to disability and bodily alteration. We’re surrounded by surveillance technologies, and we don’t really know where our data goes or what it’s used for. That uncertainty is central to this work.
I think that’s very relevant. We constantly feed information into systems without knowing what those systems ultimately do with it.
That’s a very disturbing realization for me, and it’s one reason why I want to make these structures visible.
I’d like to reflect on another aspect of your practice. You work in institutional and public contexts, but also within a gallery or commercial framework. Drawing and painting seem to play a crucial role in your work. How do these practices relate to your sculptural work?
Drawing and painting are fundamental to me; they’re where I come from. I always painted and drew, long before the sculptural practice emerged. And I still return to drawing constantly. That’s where most things begin: forms, ideas, and experiments. On paper, I’m completely free. I don’t have to worry about safety regulations, technical feasibility, or whether something will actually function.
Many of these sketches later become large-scale sculptures or working machines. This practice is also important because I can’t work on large structures all the time. Drawing becomes a kind of “time off” between exhibitions and big projects, a continuous studio practice. I really cherish these smaller works.
Solo exhibition: Judith Fegerl – calorie
Exhibition duration: 07 November 2025- 22 February 2025
More about the exhibition: www.ooekultur.at
Address and contact:
OK Linz
Museumstraße 14, 4020 Linz
www.ooekultur.at
Judith Fegerl – www.judithfegerl.net
Judith Fegerl was born in 1977 in Vienna, where she lives and works today. She graduated from the Visual Media Design and Digital Art programme at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, studying with Karel Dudesek, Thomas Fürstner, and Peter Weibel (diploma 2004). At the same time, she also studied Art and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Peter Kogler and Birgit Jürgenssen (diploma 2006). In 2019, Fegerl received the Media Art Prize of the City of Vienna, and she was recently awarded the Dagmar Chobot Sculpture Prize 2022.
In her Linz exhibition „calorie,“ the artist Judith Fegerl addresses the complex topic of warmth, combining technology, material, and feminist discourse. As a process of exchange and movement, the concept of warmth permeates private, social, and political spaces alike, raising the question of the right temperature for the living and functional conditions of both the living and technological environment. In this sense, the exhibition title „calorie“ refers to the historical unit of energy, defined as the temperature rise of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Currently, the calorie is synonymous with human consumption and frequently serves as an instrument of measurement, power, and control in shaping the body. The creative and destructive potential of heat determines the central discourses of the present – from global warming and technological questions of energy production to heat as a mode of social coexistence and a counterpoint to „bourgeois coldness.“ … (Text and curation by Susanne Watzenboeck)