GROUP EXHIBITION
Vernissage: 18.11.2026
Exhibition duration: 19.11.2026 - 22.01.2027
Curated by: Rosa Nahid Bertsch & Gabriel Zúñiga
Artists: allmas X RIO, Amina Bamieh, Ziliä Quansurá
Mentorship and Supervision: Ale Zapata
External Mentors: andrea ancira, Eva Fischer, Aleksei Borisionok, Smaranda Krings and Pêdra Costa
While state-documents function as technologies of power and turn fictions of borders, property, foreigners and enemies into reality, the exhibition counter-document explores artistic opposition to the colonial narrative. The dialogue between the works of the three participating artists opens up the question of how to resist dominant imperial narratives.
allmas X RIO gathered bureaucratic documents, letters from police, courts and government agencies received by activists in connection with pro-Palestinian activism in Austria, and returns them as Letter of Resistance, exposing the structural violence and political control behind bureaucratic repression. Asking what it means to remain in solidarity and publicly vocal under increasingly authoritarian regimes. Amina Bamieh's research into Tatreez, the traditional Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, explores its storytelling power and makes visible what these patterns carry: a language written with needle and thread. In times of ongoing genocide in Gaza, speaking about dresses might seem trivial, but it is in fact vital, highlighting Palestinian life in all its expressions is an act of care, remembrance and resistance. Ziliä Qansurá’s felted angels take up the history of Les Amours du Nord, young Bashqort warriors forced to fight for the Russian Empire during the Napoleonic Wars, and transforms it into wool pieces, exploring the tension between innocence and violence, glorification and erasure, and exposing how imperial narratives turn the suffering of Indigenous peoples into heroic myths.
The exhibition brings the document into conversation and discloses its function. Through the performativity and materiality of paper and wool, the artworks reveal how the extraction of these materials produced violence, while also bearing witness to colonial violence as in Palestine and Bashkort territory, and are then put into resistance.
To stand against the document is not only to unveil violence. It is to tell another story: the one of possibility. And it is to question our own position, as part of a society that cooperates with a genocidal, colonial logic of war. To resist is to take a position and, from that position, to generate action and movement. In counter-document we are present with our body as a document in itself. We gather around matter, embracing it, knowing that, like us, it constantly tends to a wound.
The exhibition is the culmination of the Curatorial Laboratory, a four-month paid mentoring programme, conceived as a model for more equitable curatorial practice, offering emerging curators who are systematically excluded from institutional structures the chance to gain experience in a supported, non-gatekept environment.
PUBLIC PROGRAMME
PUBLIC PROGRAMME
18.11.2026 | 7-10 PM
Vernissage
20.11.2026 | 6 PM
Curatorial Tour
guided exhibition tour in english
By Rosa Nahid Bertsch & Gabriel Zúñiga
21.11.2026 | 6 PM
Staatsräson und Neutralität. Repression gegen Palästina-Solidarität in Deutschland und Österreich. *
Testimonial Conversation and Open Exchange. The conversation will take place in German.
27.11.2026 | 7:30 PM
Curatorial Tour
guided exhibition tour in spanish
By Gabriel Zúñiga
05.12.2026 | 2PM
Subversive publishing: a skillshare
DIY publishing workshop at Scarabocchio
By Damian & Val
No prior experience is needed. Please be sure to register beforehand.**
11.12.2026 | 5:30 PM
Collective Felting Workshop
communal process of felting & artist talk
By Ziliä Quansurá
No prior experience is needed. Please be sure to register beforehand.**
18.12.2026 | 5:30 PM
textile story telling
stitching workshop
By İklim Doğan
No prior experience is needed. Please be sure to register beforehand.**
13.01.2027 | 6 PM
Curatorial Tour
guided exhibition tour in german
By Rosa Nahid Bertsch
About the artists:
allmas X RIO works at the intersection of art and activism, exploring the boundaries of artistic freedom through the lens of the Palestinian issue. They recently completed their studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe as master students of Leni Hoffmann.
Amina Bamieh is an Austrian-Palestinian archivist, researcher and creative, based between Paris and Vienna. Working in the field of textile heritage, she continues her research around objects of affection and material culture, crafting objects of charm and irony. Her work explores identity construction and the social body within the contexts she engages, blending political discourse with pop culture to craft narratives that blur the line between personal experience and collective identity.
Ziliä Qansurá is a Bashqort multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Vienna. She explores how Indigenous agency manifests as an autonomous force — in contrast to how neoliberal institutions often frame it exclusively as a response to oppression. Practicing across sculpture, installation, performance and theatre, she often works with felt, native plants, textiles and electronic waste, putting their physicality and animacy into a historical context. She mixes this context with how these materials are presented today, and with how they relate to the artist's own body — or any other body that holds traces of racialization and marginalization. Growing up in Bashqortostan, where she developed an attention to how space, movement and storytelling shape experience, she uses these traces as a somatic map and a tool for healing — a form of knowledge that brings together past and present and can inform a different, sovereign future.
The exhibition and Curatorial Laboratory are supported by MA7, BMWKMS and 15th District.
We want to specially thank Das Weisse Haus, Philomena+, Mz*Baltazar’s Lab, Kuntsverein and Saloon for their support.