2 December 2025  Art Meets Winter MarketKunsthalle Wien will host its first Artists' Market on Sunday, December 7, 2025, from 10:00 to 18:00 at its Museumsquartier venue. More than twenty artists, collectives and emerging names—selected from an open call with over 150 proposals—will present affordable artworks ranging from prints and drawings to ceramics, garments and small sculptures. For one day only, visitors can buy directly from artists, making the market an inviting stop for anyone searching for a meaningful, special holiday gift.At the same time, the institution launches its Christmas Tree—a fundraising project featuring more than thirty unique decorations created by local artists. Each piece is sold at a fixed price, raising funds for Kunsthalle Wien's new inclusion programme planned for 2026. A Place Where Art and Society IntersectThe event fits well into Kunsthalle Wien's broader program, known for engaging with urgent social questions. This year's exhibitions—from "Radical Software" to the "Vienna Digital Cultures Festival"—have shown how technology, memory and power shape our present. These themes also echo in the practices of artists featured at the market.One of them is Ju Aichinger, recently awarded a recognition prize of the Bildrecht Young Artist Award 2025 for the installation "to be or not to be (butch)". The award highlighted how their ceramic shoes, jeans and wall objects evoke absent bodies mediated through fashion, performance and digital culture. The artwork tells stories of waiting, of perseverance, of desire and being desired. Aichinger, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, works across ceramics, installation and costume. Clothing and material traces are central to their exploration of identity and collective memory. At the market, Aichinger presents "Solid Caps", a series of raku-fired ceramic baseball caps that shift between fashion object and sculpture—worn, marked and symbolically loaded. Traces of Trade, Memory and Mass CultureAnother highlight of the market preview is Ida Kammerloch, an artist born in Ischewsk and now based in Vienna. Educated in Vienna, Saarbrücken, Moscow and Valencia, she works with video, found material and archival research. Her long-term project examines her grandfather's 1990s travel-video archive and the shift from socialist to capitalist life.Her artwork "Membrane of the New" uses translucent toy packaging as exposure templates to create ghostly photograms—each one a unique print derived from mass-produced objects. A making-of video is available on her Instagram, giving insight into this tactile, analogue method. Kammerloch also contributes to the Christmas Tree project, which raises funds for Kunsthalle Wien's upcoming inclusion programming. Here, the reuse of toy packaging templates adds a playful twist: in this context, the plastic moulds—originally designed to shape identical products—become a gentle reminder that not everything, or everyone, neatly fits into preformed casts. A Winter Space for DiscoveryWith its mix of established voices, emerging artists and newly discovered talents, the Artists' Market reflects Kunsthalle Wien's role as a meeting point for contemporary trends and social reflection. It offers a playful yet thoughtful entry into current artistic production—while giving visitors the chance to take something meaningful home.Images, from left: A circle of handcrafted ceramic baseball caps from Ju Aichinger’s 'Solid Caps' (2024) series, each uniquely glazed and textured. Right: Ida Kammerloch’s photogram sheet with white silhouettes of toy packaging shapes on black background from the series 'Membrane of the New' (2023–ongoing). Photos © Ju Aichinger and © Ida Kammerloch. |