Gernot Wieland: Landscapes
A collaboration with the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
Phileas, Opernring 17, Vienna
30 January – 18 April 2026
Opening: 29 January 2026, 7-9pm
Gernot Wieland, installation view of Family Constellation with a Fox, 2025, 13th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2025. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025. Photo: Eberle & Eisfeld
Gernot Wieland, Family Constellation with a Fox, 2025, video still © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
Our opening exhibition of the year presents a video installation by Austrian artist Gernot Wieland, first shown at the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2025. The film, entitled Family Constellation with a Fox, was co-produced by Phileas and is now being shown in Vienna for the first time.
The work revolves around the attempt to heal collective, inherited wounds and to bring what has long remained unspoken to the surface. The artist envisions a family constellation as a form of therapy — one that takes place inside the belly of a whale, accompanied by personalities such as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Ingeborg Bachmann. Ceramic figures stand in for the narrator’s ego, family members, childhood environment and psychoanalytic superego.
With tragicomic irony, Wieland approaches the generational traumas of male-dominated Western art history and the mechanisms that continue to uphold social inequalities. His cultural and historical family constellation exposes the underlying structures of power, yet cannot mend the losses on which they are built. Guided by the artist’s calm voiceover, the film drifts through a network of memories in which reality and imagination seamlessly converge. Fairy tales passed down through generations, the curious adventures of a fox and biblical narratives merge with childhood memories and fragments of history. A sequence of film footage, children’s drawings, handwritten notes and clay figures accompanies the narration, mirroring the meandering, associative flow of thought. With subtle humour, the work explores repressed experiences and echoes of the past, in which the shadows of violence, loss and silence remain present.
Gernot Wieland (born 1968 in Horn, Austria) works with film, drawing and lecture performance. His practice is rooted in a childhood marked by the repressive atmosphere of postwar Austria during the 1970s and 1980s. Personal recollections intersect with collective narratives, as reality and fiction flow into one another to form, in a tragicomic way, a portrait of society.
Wieland’s works have been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Trafo Gallery, Budapest; steirischer herbst, Graz; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Salzburger Kunstverein; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; and the Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles.
He has also participated in several biennials, among them the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de América del Sur, Buenos Aires, and the 9th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial at the Vigeland Museum, Oslo. Recent awards include the Grand Prize of the German Competition at the 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2023) and the German Short Film Award (2022).