The official outdoor tour! Why not take a walk with us around the St. Stephen's Cathedral and discover the most important landmark and symbol of Vienna! This tour was created in cooperation with St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

St. Stephen’s Outdoor Experience

Vienna is full of history! Discover it by walking through the small alleys around the Rotenturmstraße. Every corner and cobblestone will tell you about the genesis of the city. If you are tired, we recommend visiting one of the famous Viennese coffeehouses. 

Explore the Heart of Old Vienna

Vienna is new to you, and you are looking to get a nicely well-rounded overview of the old city center? This tour covers historical highlights, reveals fascinating stories, and takes you down a few cobblestone streets that most visitors never see.

Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Vienna

Discover plants from all around the globe: This audio tour of the Palm House Schönbrunn will enable you to discover more than 4,000 plants from every continent.Note: The Palm House Schönbrunn is not to be confused with the Café Palmenhaus. The café is located in the Burggarten.

The Emperor's Greenhouse: Palm House

Attention! This tour includes saucy details and is not appropriate for all under 18 years.From prostitutes, johns, and mistresses to animal skin condoms, syphilis, and wax noses, to Maria Theresia, Metternich, Napoleon, and many more: the dirty secrets and shady sides of Viennese erotic activities over the years come out of the shadows in this tour. This tour was created in cooperation with wienfuehrung.

Love for Sale in Old Vienna

Naschmarkt not only offers culinary highlights but also architectural ones: the Art Deco and Viennese Modern Age buildings by Otto Wagner. This tour starts at the subway station Kettenbrückengasse and passes through Naschmarkt to Karlsplatz where two pavillons by Otto Wagner can be visited. If there's enough time afterwards, you could take the U4 in either the direction of Heiligenstadt or Hütteldorf and get out at one of the beautiful old Stadtbahn (city railway) station buildings that are still in use today.

Otto Wagner and Naschmarkt

Rent a bike, Segway, or scooter and explore the best Vienna has to offer on wheels. With your wheels, you can cover a lot of ground, meaning you’ll finish this tour with a well-rounded overview of the makeup of this old dame of a city and the stories it has to tell. Attention: Leave your phone in your pocket while driving and don't forget to keep your distance. Stay safe!

Vienna On Wheels: From Schönbrunn Palace to Stubentor

Get yourself a ride and head out on this exciting tour on which you’ll catch many sides of Vienna that most visitors never see. You’ll get started at the magnificent Hundertwasserhaus and end it all in the wine hills with a glass of delicious wine or grape juice in hand and a spectacular view over Vienna. Attention: Leave your phone in your pocket while driving and don't forget to keep your distance. Stay safe!

Vienna On Wheels: From Hundertwasserhaus up to the Wine Hills

Waltz through the city and discover the places that inspired great musicians that have walked Vienna’s streets. Meet Beethoven, Mozart, and the Strausses and find out more about the role Vienna has played in the history of music.

A Music Lover’s Guide to Vienna

Discover in this audio tour the history and architecture of the Secession and get to know interesting facts about the artists' association. Also, find out more about the Secession as an exhibition space for contemporary art and the world-famous Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt.

Tour Through the Vienna Secession  | Culture is now even more accessible

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This virtual art nouveau adventure was produced by the Viennese Secession in collaboration with the Cultural Places team.

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Welcome

Founding the Secession

Foyer

History of the Building

Side Facade

Main Facade

Welcome to the audio tour through the Secession.

Exhibition Program

General Renovation

Architectural Structure

The main exhibition room has something sacred about it – it is reminiscent of a basilica. A raised central aisle is flanked by two aisles. This structure is completed by a transept. The special thing about this showroom is that it does not require ornaments, in contrast to other showrooms that were cluttered with ornaments.

Hauptraum / Main Room

“When you examine the present you must understand your past: the past that has identified your own present. I also believe you must look into the future. That’s definitely a philosophy of life that I live with and hopefully that shows in the work that I do.” -Danh Vo Danh Vo’s conceptual works and installations often build on personal experiences to address larger historical, social, and political concerns. Born in Vietnam and raised in Denmark, the artist is fascinated by the ways in which objects and histories become intertwined, serving as projections of national anxieties and personal identities. While the erotic and violent power plays of colonialism are a recurrent theme, so too are the sacred and profane dances of religion, and the manner in which administrative systems seek to shape (even curtail) personal intimacy and expression.
Vo’s installations present a plethora of artistic strategies, including documents, photographs, found objects (of historic or emotional significance), textual fragments in the form of ornate calligraphies executed by his father, and sometimes works by other artists. As an artist, Vo encompasses multiple roles—curator, collector, historian, auction scout—allowing him to deftly play with objects and contexts. Grappling with artefacts that are fraught with symbolic or emotional meaning, the artist resets their signification from project to project.
Vo will often pluck objects purchased from the estates of significant figures (or otherwise sourced) and present them unaltered within his oeuvre. Other times he dismantles and reassembles them with incongruous additions making for striking hybrids. Since 2015, he has created new works by combining fragments of sculptures taken from antiquity with contemporary objects or Medieval Madonnas. Often the original works are defaced or forever altered—an act of cultural vandalism that mirrors colonial expansion, but that also creates a provocative splicing of cultural empires across time and space.
Fragmentation and creative alteration are also key stratagems in what is probably Vo’s best-known work: We the People (2011–2016). A full-size copy of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty manufactured in China, it consists of ca. 300 separate copper segments. Correctly assembled, they would form an accurate replica of the New York landmark; the artist’s project instead calls for the pieces to be dispersed across the globe.
Enigmatic and poetic, Vo’s work sidesteps didacticism while also arriving with a strong political ethic. Probing questions of identity and belonging, legal status, property, and the role of personal relationships, he shines a light on the power structures behind the façades of liberal societies and the fragility of our ideas about life in the nation state. 
Danh Vo was born in Bà Rịa, Vietnam, in 1975 and lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City. Since 2017, with its farm buildings and large gardens Güldenhof in Stechlin / Brandenburg serves the artist and others as studio and living environment. Curator: Jeanette Pacher

Danh Vo

Joseph Maria Olbrich

Joseph Maria Olbrich was born on December 22, 1867 in Troppau, which is now in the Czech Republic. He came into contact with construction as a child since his father owned a brick factory. In the mid-1880s, he moved to Vienna to enter the architecture class of the "Wiener Gewerbeschule." After graduation, he studied from 1890 at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1893, Olbrich entered Otto Wagner's office, where he drew, among other things, detailed plans for the Vienna Stadtbahn buildings. The Vienna Secession was also built at this time.

Forum for New Art

Galerie / Gallery

The gallery is the third exhibition room of the Secession. It consists of a cross-shaped room, a small space in between and a long room at the end of the gallery. Paintings and photographs are mainly exhibited by international artists. The gallery is also well suited for projections.

Mind awake, body asleep 
Carlos Bunga started out as a painter—that is what he studied at the Escola Superior de Arte e Design in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal—but soon felt constricted by the limitation to the canvas’s two dimensions. The experience led him to branch out by incorporating strategies from conceptual, performance, and installation art into his practice, though without altogether jettisoning the painterly framework. In the mid-2000s, he won wide acclaim with site-specific installations and performances that laid the foundation for his international career. Since then, Bunga has shown his work at numerous institutions in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America; he has also realized several major projects for outdoor settings.
Everything is caught up in a process of perpetual change; safety and stability are mere fictions or the products of social convention. As Carlos Bunga sees it, life and art play out in the unpredictable in-between. Such instability, the brittleness of reality, is especially manifest in architecture, the artist argues; although it ostensibly offers shelter, it at once also defines people’s social status. Broken pieces and ruins, the traces of devastation and destruction, are key sources of inspiration for Bunga’s architectonic interventions, which are either built in fragmentary form or transformed into ruins in a process of deconstruction he initiates. How architecture and the interplay between body and built environment influence our lives, what they tell us about our origins and possibilities: these are central concerns in Bunga’s work, as are themes like nomadism and both voluntary and forced migration:
“Nowadays, I feel like a nomad in the way I think, and also in my practice; each Project belongs to the place in which it originated, was produced, and exhibited. For me nomadism is not only a physical issue, but also a mental one. It’s a different way of looking at the world.“*
Over the years, Bunga has developed a creative vocabulary and conceptual strategies that let him engage with the specific spatial situations he encounters. His sometimes monumental and spectacular cardboard constructions respond to the architecture of the exhibition venue. He picks up on characteristic elements such as columns and pillars, flooring grids, or other distinctive formal features and replicates or deconstructs them in order to engender a momentum of irritation. In some instances, the destruction of these creations in the course of a performance by the artist becomes part of the work, illustrating the unceasing process in which things come into being and disintegrate. Comparable works installed under the open sky are exposed to the weather and effectively undergo an accelerated process of decomposition. Walk-in installations, meanwhile, cast the visitors as protagonists, inviting them to experience their own bodies as constrained by the given form.
In his exhibition Mind awake, body asleep at the Secession, Bunga examines the mysteries of the relationship between body and mind, which become especially manifest when we sleep. The two sides’ recurrent separation and the separate nocturnal existences they lead are a source of fascination for the artist, who makes his works in a process informed by rational decisions as well as intuitive choices. In rooms that he has conceived as passages between different states of mind, he probes the tension between consciousness and the subconscious, the vulnerability of the body rendered helpless by sleep, and the function of architecture, furniture, and clothes as protective shells.
Each of the four rooms is set apart by its own mood and a specific relational quality that is best described as a particular conjunction of intimacy and distance between beholders and works. This configuration is also how the artist responds to the distinctive spatial situation in the Secession’s downstairs galleries, which present as a succession of very different rooms with unique architectural characteristics. The ground plan of the first room, located beneath the lobby, has the geometric shape of a Greek cross. In the two wall recesses on the left and right that define the room, he has realized painted cardboard collages: monochrome color fields in pastel tones that look washed out and recall weather-worn building façades. The niches are glazed, like shopwindows, to establish a certain distance between beholder and work. The two other objects in the room address themselves to the visitors’ imagination: arranged on the floor are enigmatic fragments, and it is only by recourse to the corresponding drawings on the wall that one can reconstruct the complete form before the mind’s eye.
In the next room, an environment features a metal bed, employing an image from the collective memory that carries vivid dystopian associations with imprisonment or illness. This work inspired the exhibition’s title, an allusion to the pandemic-related restrictions, which have led to a general retreat into domestic life: the resulting bodily inertia, Bunga says, has created an asymmetry between mental and physical activity. For the artist himself, it has meant a renewed focus on painting, into which he now integrates plant parts like grasses and flowers—a new ingredient that reflects his yearning for nature:
“Our ideas of home and work have changed, as have the ways in which we live and labor. Nature is one of the strongest elements in the studio during this time.”*
In contrast with the pictorial collages in the first room, which are protected by glass panes, the pictures in the third room hang from the ceiling. Painted felt and silk fabrics form a labyrinthine structure through which the visitors are encouraged to chart their own paths. The resulting minute air turbulences set the pictures in motion, producing a constantly shifting three-dimensional image. Bunga’s trademark technique for mixing sizing and pigment results in agitated surfaces with very pronounced craquelure effects. The aesthetic of fissured and peeling paint also gestures back to his beginnings as an artist, when he took his pictures to buildings slated for demolition to expose them to the elements, embracing the ensuing alteration processes as a component of the work. The sensual experience of painting grows yet stronger in the last room, where he has poured glue and colors to create a walkable floor painting—the visitors find themselves literally inside the picture. 
Carlos Bunga was born in Porto in 1976 and lives and works in Barcelona.
 Curator: Bettina Spörr
* all quotes: Carlos Bunga

Carlos Bunga

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony

Composition of the Frieze

The 14th Exhibition 1902

Gesamtkunstwerk

The Beethoven Frieze is one of the main works of European Art Nouveau. This work, created by Gustav Klimt, is divided into three wall parts: two light sidewalls and a dark middle part.

Beethoven Frieze

Restauration of the Frieze

History of the Frieze

Gustav Klimt

For Gustav Klimt, the Beethoven Frieze marked the beginning of the “golden period." With this style, Klimt became the most important painter of his generation in Vienna. Today, Gustav Klimt is considered the main representative of Viennese Art Nouveau – as this cultural and historical epoch was called in Europe around 1900. As a founding member and first president of the Secession, he shaped the Austrian style that became known as the "Secession style."

Grafisches Kabinett

The figure group of Marc Anton is below the window. This sculpture was made by Arthur Strasser for the Paris World's Fair in 1900. The chariot of the Roman general is pulled by lions and panthers. The lazy and complacent Marc Anton can also be understood as a symbol of the decadence of historicism.

Grafisches Kabinett / Graphic Cabinet

Standard_Deviation
 
Rana Hamadeh’s works are characterized by engulfing delirious sonic and visual environments. She has been developing an ‘operatic practice,’ experimenting with writing and composing, and testing models for collective (and artificially-extended) forms of thinking and study. In thematic terms, her work is dedicated to an ongoing scrutiny of the epistemologies and technologies of justice. To this end, it examines tropes of violence that find their genealogies in the linguistic, legal, and theatrical infrastructures shaping our understandings of justice.
At the Secession, Hamadeh presents a new stage of her evolving animation film Standard_Deviation. The film, which was developed in close cooperation with the artist Sara Hamadeh, ventures into Sophocles’ famed tragedy Oedipus Rex. Rather than re­narrating the misfortunes of Oedipus, king of Thebes, whose grievous journey of self­discovery unfolds at the height of the Theban plague, the work conducts a reading of the dramatic constructs of Sophocles’ play itself—that is, of his figuration of tragedy as a “technology of endurance.” The film is based on a libretto written by the artist that is translated into different forms, spoken word, operatic renditions, and print. Taking a poetic approach to the ancient story, the work sheds new light on the tragedy’s course by placing the age­old characters before a backdrop of various visual and sonic references, non­linear narrative structures, and eerie spaces.
The digitally generated film sequences suggest a computer game. The film comprises two different visual logics: One logic takes the form of a 2D pixel animation reminiscent of 1980s and early 1990s platform computer games (with obstacles that need to be overcome in order to reach ‘higher levels’). The other logic manifests in a strikingly different 3D animation that reveals glimpses of the inner psyche of the characters, as if viewing the game from two different registers. The 3D­animated insights allow the viewer to accept a warped storyline in this ‘game narrative.’ The plot in the traditional sense gives way to seemingly absurd events that find their genealogy in the characters’ heightened life moments of struggle, birth, death, destruction, and resurrection.
The visualized scenarios are as dreamlike as they are sinister, the action propelled by cogwheels and prostheses. The film is structured around a recurring theme of running, as in Oedipus’s attempt to escape his destiny. Characters such as the leg, the shrimp, the block chairs, the paper plane, and the traffic cone wander through settings inspired by an anatomy theater. Theatres within theatres constantly unfold. The illusive and chimerical imagery is accompanied by a six-channel cacophonic sound composition specifically spatialized for the exhibition. The sound consistently intensifies. A mise-en-abymic loop, a sense of claustrophobia, and the incapacity to voluntarily exit the spaces that we are made to enter—the work is a play on the senses and the nervous system. The experience of trance combined with a sense of disorientation is key.
Generally, Hamadeh undertakes artistic research in discursive projects that grow and evolve over several years and take manifest form in immersive audio­visual installations and stage sets, performances, interactive sound­based system designs and compositions, as well as texts and pedagogical setups. Standard_Deviation is part of her long­term growing series, The Destiny Project. Launched in 2020, The Destiny Project aims at exploring the production, consumption, circulation, and articulation of desire in contemporary global public discourse.
 
Rana Hamadeh was born in Beirut in 1983 and lives and works in Rotterdam.
Sara Hamadeh was born in Beirut in 1991 and lives and works in Rotterdam.
 
The Destiny Project / Standard_Deviation was commissioned by SCHUNCK (Gemeente Heerlen) and made possible by SCHUNCK (Gemeente Heerlen), steirischer herbst ’20, and the Secession, with generous support from the Mondriaan Fonds and Gemeente Rotterdam.

Rana Hamadeh

Upcoming Exhibitions: <a href="https://www.secession.at/en/exhibition/nairy-baghramian/">Nairy Baghramian</a> Breath Holding Spell 20.11.2021 – 23.1.2022 <a href="https://www.secession.at/en/exhibition/sarah-rapson/">Sarah Rapson</a> ODE TO PSYCHE 20.11.2021 – 23.1.2022 <a href="https://www.secession.at/en/exhibition/nora-turato/">Nora Turato</a> ri-mEm-buhr THuh mUHn-ee 20.11.2021 – 23.1.2022 Permanent Presentation: Gustav Klimt – The Beethoven Frieze (1902) Gustav Klimt designed the famous Beethoven Frieze for the XIV. Exhibition of the Austrian Secession Association of Visual Artists that ran from 15 April to 27 June 1902. The idea of the Secessionist gesamtkunstwerk [all-embracing art work] was realized in this exhibition which was conceived of as a homage to the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.

Exhibitions

The Secession would like to thank the main sponsor Erste Bank for their commitment. 
 
The Vienna Secession is a gallery for contemporary art that is without equal in the history of modernism. It presents a cutting-edge program of tomorrow’s best art in a building whose architecture embodies the spirit of optimism that swept Europe around 1900. The Secession’s home is one of the continent’s best-known art-nouveau buildings and a famous Viennese landmark. The permanent presentation of Gustav Klimt’s famous Beethoven Frieze also helps draw large audiences to the museum. 
 
By cooperating with private corporations, for the long term as well as on specific projects, the Secession seeks to build a sustainable future in keeping with its original motto: "To every age its art. To art its freedom." As a private artists’ association, the Secession generates 70 % of its operating budget, and we could not live up to our mission without the ongoing support of our patrons, sponsors, and cooperation partners.

What's included

Preview

1. Foyer

2. Hauptraum / Main Roo...

3. Danh Vo

4. Joseph Maria Olbrich

5. Galerie / Gallery

6. Carlos Bunga

7. Beethoven Frieze

8. Gustav Klimt

9. Grafisches Kabinett ...

10. Rana Hamadeh

11. Exhibitions

12. Support

1. Welcome