Tanja Widmann and Johannes Porsch in London, UK
Cell Project Space, London, UK
6 June – 10 August 2025
Cell Project Space presents -1, plus One, the first solo exhibition by artist Tanja Widmann in the United Kingdom. The exhibition is conceived as a site of negotiation—material, social, affective—where authorship is ‘beside itself’, as in the collaboration with Johannes Porsch / Produced by Johannes Porsch. Read together as Tanja Widmann Johannes Porsch Produced by -1, plus One, the title suggests a conceptual machine ofaddition and subtraction, of lack and desire, and of the structure producing subjects as much as subjects producing the structure.
Tanja Widmann (born 1966 in Villach, Austria) is a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice navigates the material constraints and social fictions that regulate contemporary life, tracing the symbolic and economic circuits through which value is produced and circulated. Scripts—readymade objects, images, texts—serve as source code: for reception, (re)production, and deviation. Working with the everyday techof the home office, laptop, printer, cell phone, etc.—and materials from the hardware store, Widmann’s works function as coded feedback loops: degraded, recomposed. Drawing on the Pictures Generation and Charles Baudelaire, the cliché becomes preferred data. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Schiefe Zähne, Berlin; 15th Baltic Triennial, CAC, Vilnius; University Gallery of the Angewandte, Vienna; FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna; New Toni, Berlin and Kunsthalle Wien.
Johannes Porsch (born 1970 in Innsbruck, Austria) is an artist, curator and author. He develops displays that operate as performative sets—objects that articulate the conditions of their own visibility. In dialogue with post-minimal and post-conceptual strategies, they foreground use-value and destabilise autonomy by rendering its heteronomous supports. These structures sustain positions and enable relations, anticipating events while modulating presence. Abstraction does not generalise; it fractures reiexivity, revealing labour as both structural and obscured. What appears autonomous is revealed as contingent, on holding, showing, connecting. Status—objectal or relational—is the effect of ongoing negotiation. His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna; Museum of applied arts, Vienna; Kunstverein Munich; Universitätsgalerie of the University of applied arts, Vienna; Julius Koller Society, Bratislava; Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt; Tiroler Künstlerschaft, Innsbruck; mumok, Vienna; Kyiv Biennal; Secession, Vienna; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; Salzburger Kunstverein and Generali Foundation, Vienna.
This is Tanja Widmann’s und Johannes Porsch’s first collaboration with Phileas. The exhibition results from a research trip to Vienna by curator Adomas Narkevičius in March 2024 at the invitation of Phileas.
Tanja Widmann und Johannes Porsch, Produziert von, -1, One plus (Derivates), 2025, Cell Project Space