MENTAL LOAD
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COMING UP:
MENTAL LOAD & INVISIBLE LABOUR
On Care, Structures, and the Politics of the Unseen
Bad Ischl – Venice – Vienna | May – November 2026
MENTAL LOAD UND UNSICHTBARE ARBEIT
Trinkhalle, Sudhaus der Salinen Austria, Galerie Am Fluss
Location: Trinkhalle, Auböckplatz 5, 4820 Bad Ischl, Austria
Date: 6.5.2026, 5:30 pm
MENTAL LOAD AND INVISIBLE LABOUR
ECC VENICE BIENNIAL 2026, ITALY
Location: Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy
Date: 9.5.2026, 10am - 6pm, Cannaregio, Strada Nova 3659, Venezia
MENTAL LOAD UND UNSICHTBARE ARBEIT
ANGEWANDTE FESTIVAL, AUSTRIA
Location: Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Date: 1. 7. 2026, 4 pm
The Weight of the Invisible
There are forms of labour that leave no trace—no object, no measurable output, no clear beginning or end.
And yet, they structure everything.
Mental Load and Invisible Labour is dedicated to this often-overlooked dimension of work:
the continuous organizing, planning, remembering, anticipating, and caring that sustains everyday life. Increasingly recognized as a social and political issue, mental load operates at the intersection of personal experience and structural inequality. It is unevenly distributed, frequently gendered, and deeply embedded in cultural expectations and social systems.
This exhibition begins from a simple but urgent premise: what remains invisible must be made perceptible.
From Open Call to Collective Process
The exhibition originates in an international open call initiated by Daniela Auerbach, Pia Scharler, and myself, and developed in cooperation with the Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Addressed particularly to students, alumni, and staff, the call created a framework in which individual experiences of mental load intersect with broader structural conditions. The selected works reflect this intersection—bridging biography and system, intimacy and critique.
The project was embedded within a course of the same name (Mateus-Berr, Carli, Kern), transforming the exhibition into a space of learning and practice.
The entire process—open call, jury deliberation, artistic development, and exhibition-making—became part of an expanded pedagogical field.
Here, artistic production is inseparable from organization, responsibility, and collaboration.Mental load is not only represented—it is enacted, negotiated, and shared.
Artistic Approaches: Between Residue and Resistance
Across performance, video, painting, sculpture, and installation, the participating artists develop diverse strategies to approach the invisible:
Domestic materials and household devices are recontextualized and politicized
Residues of care work become sculptural substance
Repetitive gestures of maintenance evolve into choreographic structures
Narratives of care are fragmented, layered, and reassembled
The male gaze is exposed, disrupted, and parodied
In these works, exhaustion becomes visible, repetition becomes form, and the everyday becomes a site of resistance.
Re-Reading Images, Re-Framing Power
A number of works engage directly with historical and religious iconographies. These images—often deeply ingrained in cultural memory—are re-read through feminist perspectives that question authorship, representation, and power.
What emerges is not a replacement of one image by another, but a shift in perspective:
A multiplication of voices, a destabilization of norms, a reconfiguration of what—and who—is seen.
A Geography of Movement: Salt, Water, City
A Translocal Exhibition
The exhibition unfolds across three locations, connected conceptually through elements of salt, water, and urban space—each carrying its own historical, material, and metaphorical weight.
Bad Ischl | 6–16 May 2026
Location: Trinkhalle, Sudhaus der Salinen Austria, Galerie Am Fluss
In Bad Ischl, the project engages with the material history of salt—once a source of wealth, labour, and power. Salt becomes a metaphor for accumulation and pressure, for what crystallizes over time yet often remains unseen. The physical sites anchor the exhibition in histories of extraction and value.
Venice — ECC Biennale 2026 | 9 May – 22 November 2026
Location: Palazzo Mora
At the European Cultural Centre’s Biennale in Venice, the exhibition expands into an international context. The city itself—built on water, shaped by flux and fragility—reflects the dynamics of balance and instability that characterize mental load on a global scale.
Here, the focus shifts: from individual experience to collective, geopolitical entanglements. Invisible labour appears as part of larger systems of exchange, dependency, and transformation.
Vienna — Angewandte Festival | 1–4 July 2026
Location: University of Applied Arts Vienna
In Vienna, the project returns to its point of departure. Within the Angewandte Festival, the exhibition becomes part of a context of teaching, artistic research, and institutional reflection. The processes behind the works—learning, organizing, mediating—come into view.
Vienna gathers the threads: personal, social, and global dimensions converge and open into dialogue.
Mediation as Practice
Beyond its display, the exhibition extends through mediation formats developed for different audiences and contexts. These formats invite participation, discussion, and reflection.
Mental load is not only shown—it is spoken about, negotiated, and collectively examined.The exhibition becomes a space of exchange: between students and publics, between art and education, between experience and discourse.
A Jury of Perspectives
The works were selected by a jury bringing together expertise from curatorial practice, artistic production, and theory: Günther Oberhollenzer, Tanja Prušnik, Daniela Auerbach, Jakob Reitinger, Anita Kern, Christina Carli, and myself.
Their perspectives shaped a selection that reflects both the urgency and the complexity of the theme.
The Artists
At the centre of Mental Load and Invisible Labour are the participating artists, whose works articulate, question, and transform the conditions of invisible labour.
Participating artists:
@die4grazien feat. @christianespatt
Amanda Bravo
Robert Cambrinus
David Carol Fedders
Edo Amelie Katavic
Sarah Kretschmer
Lena Mayringer
Susanne Meerwald-Stadler Veronika Merklein Wolfgang Miksits
Paula Peters
@schottenringding Lena Reutenauer Jonas Rottmann
Alexandra Rusz
karo_sams
Gabriele Schuller @kunstnomadin
Christiane Spatt
Astrid Starrermayr @artby_as
Gertraude Stüger
Golnaz Walamotamed
Their contributions form a polyphonic field—one that resists simplification and insists on multiplicity.
Thanks and Acknowledgements
This exhibition is the result of sustained collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and locations.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to:
the City of Bad Ischl, especially Mayor Ines Schiller, and all local partners (Salzkammergut Bad Ischl)
the European Cultural Centre (ECC), including Micaela Skerl, Lucia Pedrana, and their team
the University of Applied Arts Vienna, particularly Rector Ulrike Kuch and Vice-Rector Maria Zettler
the Angewandte Festival team, especially Lena Kohlmayr, Zentrum Didaktik für Kunst und interdisziplinären Unterricht
Salinen Austria
Special thanks to:
Daniela Auerbach (Galerie am Fluss)
Anita Kern (curatorial and graphic support)
Christina Carli (funding and organisation)
Michaela Schober (editing)
Orna Baumgartner, Ebba Fransén Waldhör, Isabel Kranz (support)
Tanja Prušnik (President, Künstlerhaus Wien) and Günther Oberhollenzer (Curator, Künstlerhaus Wien)
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the sponsors:
Hubert Achleitner (Hubert von Goisern)
Jakob Reitinger (Regensburg Tourism)
The Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs
Forum Austriaco di Cultura Milano
Kultur Oberösterreich
Regensburg Tourismus GmbH
And finally, our deepest thanks to all ARTISTS, contributors—named and unnamed—whose commitment has made it possible to bring this topic into visibility.
Toward Visibility
Mental Load and Invisible Labour understands artistic practice as a form of knowledge production. It demonstrates how complex social conditions can be translated into form, experience, and public discourse.
The exhibition does not resolve the tensions it reveals.Instead, it holds them open.
Between visibility and invisibility.Between individual and structure.Between care and exhaustion.
And in doing so, it invites us not only to see differently—but to reconsider how responsibility, labour, and attention are shared.
Curated by Ruth Mateus-Berr, Anita Kern, Daniela Auerbach
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