The selection ranges from ‘ancient milk’ to one drop of milk from the devil’s udder: Claudia Lomoschitz’s Milk Bar features an array of extraordinarily named milk-delicacies on its menu – though not all of them are meant to be drunken. This is because the performance project ‘MILK BAR – Vessels of Song’, which takes place at six public venues in Vienna, explores milk not only as a culinary substance, but also as an acoustic and historical one.

Claudia Lomoschitz’s earlier works, including “WATER OF LIFE AND DOMINATION” (2025), “LACTANS” (2024) and “INDUCED LACTATION” (2017), are based on extensive cultural and art-historical research into the subject of milk and propose artistic (counter-)narratives to societal notions and fantasies surrounding breastfeeding, lactation and human reproduction. Milk possesses a political and historical body, says Claudia Lomoschitz. And so, as part of “MILK BAR – Vessels of Song”, the artist also draws attention to the “milk bodies” that have been all but forgotten in Vienna’s urban landscape – the 3,500 cows that lived in Vienna before the Second World War, or the more than 223 “Milchmeier”, as the small suburban dairy farms and milk processing businesses were known.

The culinary-acoustic performance series “MILK BAR – Vessels of Song” takes the audience to six locations in Vienna that are closely linked to milk as a staple food: The Milk Bar in the City Park, for example, tells the story of the fashion for drinking milk in Vienna at the turn of the century. Vienna’s Molkereistraße in the Stuwerviertel still serves as a reminder today that Vienna had its own dairy until 1992. And for decades, the former Semmelweis Clinic housed the human milk collection centre, an important institution that has its international origins in Vienna.

Alongside the Viennese milk tales, Claudia Lomoschitz and the performers Alex Franz Zehetbauer and Crystal Wall offer not only milky drinks at the MILK BAR, but also songs and other performative delights. ‘MILK BAR – Vessels of Song’ invites you on a historical and performative journey: by engaging the senses, it also entices you to dissolve entrenched images and shatter normative notions.