I would like to start with the fact that this is not the first exhibition you are curating in the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; it’s the third one. The first was ‚Transformation and Recurrence Reflections. On Radical Nationalisms in Contemporary Art‘. It was a show about artists who somehow referred to historical or contemporary movements of the radical right and low-fascist tendencies. That was the first project, which took place during Corona times, so it was mainly online. And the second one was ‚The Life of Things‘, which was about the fate of cultural heritage objects between looting, safekeeping, destruction, and restitution. You are co-curating ‘The World Without Us’ with Hemma Schmutz, artistic director of Lentos Kunstmuseum. How was the dynamic of working together? Did you make a proposal regarding the topic and the concept behind it, or is it a need of the museum to have an exhibition on a certain topic, and then you come up with the artists?
The dynamic was different with every project. For the first and second shows, I was invited by Schmutz to work on the topics because they were very important to the museum, arising from contemporary urgencies. But the idea and the concept for ‘The World Without Us’ I proposed myself.
For me, it’s always an advantage to have a sparring partner in curatorial work.. It’s very good to have someone to think with. If you don’t want to make a classic exhibition that is ideologically closed in itself, it’s always good to have somebody on the other side, to check and counter-check what works, what could work, and what you want.
Can you tell us about the space in the museum where the exhibition will take place? And can you walk us through the structure of the show?
It will be downstairs, in the subterranean area of the museum. The space will look differently than usually. It’s a very dark exhibition. Metaphorically, but also physically.
The idea behind the exhibition design comes from something like a planetarium: things are very isolated, yet in relation to each other. The light is very reduced, coming mainly from projections of videos, or objects that emit light themselves, or are spotlighted so they appear very isolated.
As we know, in the darkness, even a small light becomes very bright.
The idea came from the observation that there are many exhibitions dealing with the Anthropocene. For me, the term carries a kind of eschatological tone—this idea of a final test, an ultimate moment of humankind, which comes out of a Western, Christian narrative: the beginning of creation and then an apocalypse at the end. It was interesting for me to sketch a cosmology beyond the Anthropocene.
The choreography of the exhibition is structured into four chapters. The first chapter is “Disappearing – The End of the Anthropocene”. The second is “Deep Time,” a term coming from geology. Then we move into “Deep Space”, a concept of a universe beyond the human scale. And the last chapter deals with Cosmic Horror, the fear of the unknown, ideas of non-human existence, of something alien or beyond humanity.
Do you feel that these chapters in the exhibition are not only about design and spatial choreography, about how people move through the exhibition, but also about storytelling? Narrative-driven exhibitions seem to have grown a lot in the past five years, especially institutionally. It’s no longer just about showing a collection and connecting it with younger artists, but about building a narrative, often also with a fictional layer inside it. How important is storytelling for you?
For me, dramaturgy is important, first of all, because it allows you to take visitors in. Some works are very context-specific, and we do provide texts and context, but I want people to enter intuitively, through aesthetics, through atmosphere, so they are carried through the exhibition. At the same time, the exhibition is multivoiced. It’s not just one narrative thread.
Yes, there is darkness and melancholy, but there are also works that bloom in their own universes. It’s not a closed, one-directional exhibition. Another important aspect is the sublime, the very presence of the universe. For example, in Katharina Sieverding’s work, ‘Looking at the Sun at Midnight’, she uses NASA imagery of solar flares and the sun’s magnetic field, projected at a monumental scale. It confronts you with phenomena far beyond human scale, triggering a sense of awe.
The artists participating are living artist but there are also historical positions such as Dürer. How do you come up with positions, and I can imagine that preparations were quite long?
The list includes various established artists and young ones. Some historical works and objects come out of other contexts, not only art, but also scientific collections.
I always work on topics that are already very close to my work, my interests, and my research. So it’s hard to separate where the preparation really starts and ends.
I would say from the moment you decide you’re doing an exhibition, it’s about two years. And during that time, it’s also constantly in your mind, you’re trying different constellations, thinking about combinations and relationships between certain artworks or objects, and how they can fertilize and gravitate towards each other, how something new can emerge out of their relation.
In the exhibition, there are many connections between artworks that were maybe not the primary intention of the artist or the object. But in combination, they create something else, or an aspect appears in a work that was potentially already there, but only becomes visible in a certain context.
Can you give us an example of that?
We have this alien skull by H.R. Giger, the Xenomorph, which comes out of the science-fiction world—a movie prop. If you combine it with Sophia Gatzkan’s work, which deals a lot with the body, bodily transformation, prosthetics, and so on, she approaches the body from a political perspective. In combination with the Giger piece, the focus shifts more toward transhumanist ideas—no longer fully human, but hybrid forms. This aspect becomes much more highlighted.
Can you give us one example of a work that represents the end of humanity as we know it, and tell us about the work by Dürer?
For the end of the Anthropocene, we have a work by DARUM, an artist duo mainly coming from theatre and performative interventions. They created a virtual reality world where you enter an abandoned environment of a legacy figure, a girl who died, and whose parents created a digital memorial figure to continue interacting with as a strategy to cope with their grief. In this virtual world, this avatar (equipped with artificial intelligence) is abandoned by its creators. It raises questions about immortality fantasies, like those coming out of Silicon Valley, the idea of extending life endlessly into the digital. But even these virtual worlds might one day disappear.
The work by Dürer is actually positioned opposite a real meteorite. If you look at the background of the work ‘Melencolia’, there’s a comet or meteorite, the first appropriate depiction of such a phenomenon in art history. There are speculations that Dürer might have seen a meteorite, which fell near Basel in his time; perhaps this inspired him to include it in his allegory of melancholy. This cosmic undertone runs through the whole exhibition. It’s about creativity, but also about disappearance; about dying, or transformation, not as an end.
But when you talk about the digital world. The digital world also depends on physical infrastructure, right? Servers, hardware, the “boxes” that hold the data. If the hardware dies…
Exactly. That contradiction is very interesting. If you think about how energy extensive digital servers are, and the amount of hardware and capital behind them, it becomes clear that this isn’t some ephemeral, immaterial realm. It’s deeply rooted in physical reality.
I often had that discussion too. Many people work with video, VR, or 3D-rendered environments, and all these digital works still rely on physical structures like buildings, servers, and infrastructures that exist somewhere, just like our buildings in which we live. They make all of this possible. I would like to ask something more speculative. The title of the show refers to a world we know, but without us. If you imagine that world, what is left? How does it exist?
The show has a very dark, melancholic undertone, of course. But at the same time, it can be understood as a kind of meditative dissolution, a vanishing of worlds. There’s also influence from Hindu cosmology, which is cyclical rather than linear: worlds come and go, they are destroyed, and new ones emerge. It’s also about decentering humanity. We are not the center of the universe, as the Enlightenment already began to show us. And there is something almost soothing in that idea.
For example, in the work of Anna Jermolaewa, “Chernobyl Safari”, you see a kind of unintended wildlife sanctuary, a post-apocalyptic landscape where life has returned. In the supposedly uninhabitable radioactive zones, life flourishes, sometimes even more than in surrounding areas still shaped by human intervention.
I’d like to ask about the notion of the uncanny in the show. How is it present? And how do you define it?
The uncanny emerges when the universe no longer relates to you. It’s about the indifference of the universe toward human existence. You encounter phenomena, or even entities that are no longer in direct communication with you, and that is an unsettling imagination.
The exhibition opens with a quote from H.P. Lovecraft. In the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft transformed the fear of the unknown into something cosmic. His personal and social anxieties are present in his work, but they are sublimated into the idea of alien entities, beings beyond human scale and understanding.
That, for me, is a definition of the uncanny: something that confronts you, but without reciprocity.
There is a work based on a historical anatomical model of an eye, “Second Sight“ by Nika Neelova. In this version, the eye is black and opaque. You are looking into something that seems to stare back, but it doesn’t respond. You feel watched, but there is no communication. There is no gaze you can connect with. It’s hostile, predatory, and inaccessible.
How do all these concepts you place together become visible in the material or medium of the works?
There is quite a range of media, from digital works and video to very physical objects. For example, we show a meteorite from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, an object that carries a kind of reliquary quality. With my post-Catholic background, I’m very aware of this fascination with the “real thing,” the authentic relic. At the same time, there are deliberately artificial materials. For example, Philip Topolovac’s work resembles parasitic sci-fi architecture, but they’re made of cheap materials, cardboard, and set-design elements like those used in pre-CGI science-fiction films. So you have both authenticity and imitation, relic and fiction.
There is also sound in the space. In Natalia Domínguez Rangel’s work, sound, light, and material come together. The sound comes of recordings from the worlds we don’t have direct access to; inside the body and from deep-sea environments. It appears only subtly in the space.
What is your wish for the audience to take from the exhibition? Is it about education, expanding knowledge, creating atmospheres, or something else?
I hope people leave with a slightly altered perspective. We live in a time that often feels like a constant “shit show,” full of bad news. The exhibition is not meant as escapism, but perhaps as a way to step back and to look at things from another scale. If it’s a meditation on dissolution, then it’s also about letting go for a moment. About realizing that there are dimensions and processes far beyond our daily crises.
Exhibition: The World Without Us
Curated by: Markus Proschek, Hemma Schmutz
Curatorial Assistant: Sandra Eichinger
Artist participating: Klemens Brosch, Martin Dammann, DARUM, Albrecht Dürer, Mark Fridvalszki, Sophia Gatzkan, H.R. Giger, Anna Jermolaewa, Alfred Kubin, Nicolás Lamas, Angelika Loderer, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Nika Neelova, Markus Proschek, Natalia Domínguez Rangel, Katharina Sieverding, Philip Topolovac, Chin Tsao, Martin Walde, Michał Zawada, u. a
Exhibition duration: February 06 – May 10 2026
Opening hours: Tue–Sun: 10 AM–6 PM; Thu: 10 AM–8 PM; Mon: Closed
Address and contact:
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz
Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz
www.lentos.at
As a result of the Enlightenment, science extended the traditional Western conception of space and time into the realms of sheer infinity. The universe became older, larger, and colder. This coincided with a sense of unease that mankind was no longer at the centre of the universe, no longer rooted in a world view that was capable of wresting ultimate meaning from history.
The threat of an apocalypse gave way to a geological continuity of disasters and changes. There is a dawning awareness of an uncanny, sublime indifference towards the human scale in a universe that is neither empty nor animate, but rather undead.
The exhibition brings together artistic positions that draw on concepts such as “deep time” – time periods spanning billions of years, in which human existence is little more than a fleeting moment – and “cosmic horror”, a feeling caught between fascination and terror when faced with non-human existence that is inconceivable to our notions of time and space.
Markus Proschek (born 1981 in Salzburg, Austria) is a contemporary visual artist and curator based in Vienna and Berlin. His work is characterized by a „dense system of references“ that explores the intersections of aesthetics, history, and ideology. www.markusproschek.com www.instagram.com/markusproschek
