Amid glamorous shopping sprees and throngs of tourists, Hannes Zebedin makes two parallel social worlds collide. Superficially seen, they rarely come in contact but in the logic of cause and effect, they both relate to the luxury shopping mile and promenade on Graben in different ways. One is the obvious reality that presents itself there. The other one, the one we do not see, is brought on site by the artist as a non-place by using two different settings to force a switch of perspective and direct attention to the symbolic value of clothes and fashion.

While the high-price designer clothes cemented into a wall represent, like iconic exhibits, the prestige and desire of the people on site, the clothes strewn out on the ground of an abstracted landscape speak of the desires of other people, of those who are between places, that is, in non-places, that need to be overcome to get to the safety of a different place. “Anything not necessary in the moment, anything felt to hinder moving on is left behind on the routes of the refugees. Downtown Vienna also is full of clothes that are not (yet) needed. And yet, there is a desire to see bodies wearing the clothes on display. Aside from the necessary financial means, the people who feel it have, above all, one thing: the right passport,” says the artist who analyzes the impact of geopolitical structures on landscapes in his works, translating it into sculptural assemblages.