Frederick Kiesler.
The Endless Search

Exhibition
May 28, 2025 – November 14, 2025

Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation
Mariahilfer Straße 1b / Top 1, 1060 Vienna, Austria

Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10 am – 5 pm,
closed on public holidays
Free admission

Finissage and closing event
in the course of Vienna Art Week
Friday, November 14th, 2025, 6 pm
Free admission
With texts by Frederick Kiesler,
read by Miriam Stoney,
music by Stefan Grimus.

The evening is hosted by Director Gerd Zillner.

Cultural Nomads
We are nomads-cultural nomads. Or better: Nomads of civilization. Moving from one apartment to another, from one town to another, or across borders into different lands. Seeking opportunities and quitting them of they fulfill their promise fast. We live an emergency life, a deadline life.

– Entry for Friday, January 22, 1960, p. 249
Frederick Kiesler, Inside the Endless House
(New York : Simon and Schuster, 1966)

Varian Fry – the paths of exile

Exhibition: 18.06.2025 – 04-01.2026
Opening: 18.06.2025, 6pm
Museum Mémorial de Caen, France

“Faktura 10” and RIBBON International present

The Stammering Circle

Exhibition: 21.06. – 02.11.2025
Opening: June 21, 2025
Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv, Ukraine

The Stammering Circle, a distributed exhibition on view at locations throughout Lviv, addresses disruption as dysfluency—a “stammering” that makes room for the pause essential to the exhibition of art in the context of war. A noisy business, war is voluminous, invasive, and serially destructive. It intercepts the continuum of time, breaks our understanding of cause and effect, violently occupies the everyday, and challenges the basic tenets of existence.

What constitutes art in times of rupture? How is it possible to find refuge from war’s perpetual state of contingency to make room for creative reflection? What are the forms and expressions—beyond mourning, loss, and requiem—that seize on instability to make a generative space to create resonantly? The Stammering Circle, curated by Marta Kuzma, draws inspiration from the writings of Czernowitz-born Paul Celan to respond to these questions. The poet, who in the aftermath of the tragedy and trauma of World War II emphasized art’s need to roam in an “art-less, art-free manner,” enabling alternative routes of lived experience. Grappling with a way to position art following destruction and desecration, Celan adapted his own approach to form, content, texture, and sound to conceive a postwar composition interconnected with a darkness acknowledged by all. He drafted a manifesto for art that revolved around the search for a poetic space and language that is immaterial “yet terrestrial, as something circular that returns to itself across both poles while—ultimately finding … a meridian.” In this sense, the stammering serves as the resounding passage of rhythms and repetitions charting a new route, as one previously untaken.

The Stammering Circle encompasses the visual, the auditory, the performative, and the dialogic. The project embraces testimony, historical material, archival documentation, and myriad discussions that acknowledge the lived experience of war as posited within art production. At the same time, it reflects on the experience of those who have left, expatriated, or exiled themselves to constitute — as Celan writes in “The Meridian”— a relentless battle with placelessness.

The Stammering Circle is a project of “Faktura 10”, a key initiative of RIBBON International, whose main curator and artistic director is Marta Kuzma.

Artists in the exhibition:
Nobuyoshi Araki, Gregory Varshavczyk, Francisco Goya, Moira Davey, Trisha Donnelly, R. G. Quaitman, Frederick Kiesler, Yana Kononova, Katya Kopeikina, Anna-Maria Kucherenko, Clarice Lispector, Boris Mikhailov, Noel Nutels, Yanina Pedan, Julie Pauly, Charlotte Pozenenske, Walid Raad, Oleksiy Radynsky, Yaroslav Solop, Harun Faroki, Center for Spatial Technologies.

Duration: June 21 – November 2, 2025
Opening hours:
Tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-20:00, Mon – closed

The Chalk Circle
Public program as part of the exhibition

The title of the exhibition The Stammering Circle, a combination of the words “stammering” and “circle”, refers to the concepts proposed by Paul Celan, which are linked to the ideas of truth, justice and social responsibility – the cross-cutting themes of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
The discursive program accompanying the exhibition takes up Brecht’s aforementioned work directly and uses this reference to create a common framework for the presentation of projects and lectures by artists, cultural workers, thinkers, philosophers, architects, musicians and composers who deal with the themes addressed in The Stammering Circle.

The Chalk Circle will be held at various venues in Lviv and Kiev, including
Jam Factory Art Center,
Lviv Polytechnic University,
National University “Kiev-Mohyla Academy” and
“House of Sound”.

Attention: The program is subject to possible changes. The latest details and a schedule of public events can be found on the websites of faktura10.org and jamfactory.ua .

Polytechnic National University of Lviv
Machine Room, Building 10, Ustyanovycha Street No. 5
Lecture:
Frederick Kiesler. Magic Architecture
by Gerd Zillner, Director Friedrich Kiesler Foundation
Friday, June 20, 2025, 5:00 pm

Friedrich Kiesler.
Endless House

Permanent presentation

mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna, Austria

Permanent presentation by mumok Vienna in cooperation with the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation.

Curated by Marie-Therese Hochwartner and Gerd Zillner