Queer Immortality
Death Must Be a Non-Binary Viennese Person
Exhibition at QUEER MUSEUM VIENNA from 2 October 2026 to 24 January 2027
Exhibition opening: 1 October from 6:00 pm
How do we remember lives that elude our conventions of mourning?
The multimedia art exhibition Queer Immortality at QUEER MUSEUM VIENNA explores queer forms of remembrance and sheds light on different perspectives on life, death, and transience. For many queer identities, death can mean erasure or reinterpretation. Queer people may be removed from their social contexts and separated from their chosen families. Traditional rituals surrounding death and mourning often fail to reflect queer lived realities.
Artistic positions by Peter Kozek, LA GEORGETTA, Heti Prack, Siggi Sekira, and Florian Aschka present mourning as a collective experience and memory as sometimes distorted. They envision queer alternatives for funerals and burial sites that may appear disruptive and unfamiliar, but for precisely that reason are able to do justice to queer ways of life. Space, too, can be connected to loss and mourning, as activists demonstrate in their engagement with patriarchal violence and the remembrance of the destroyed St. Marx autonomous space. In Queer Immortality, Julia Fuchs explores the art depot as an in-between space of im/mortality, while Danielle Pamp approaches the (im)mortality underlying rupture and transformation.
Lesbian Vampires from Styria, Drag Queens, and Horror Films
The provocative engagement with death and (im)mortality is an essential part of queer cultural history. In the web series Just Gorgeous – Beauty for Dead People, developed by Berivan Sayici and Luis Javier Murillo and featured in the exhibition, drag queens become undertakers. In a series of performative installations by the collective HEATHERS, supporting characters who are usually the first to be killed off in horror films take centre stage.
In literature and art, vampires have long stood for forbidden desire, hidden subcultures, fluid gender identities, and the rejection of social norms. The prototype of the lesbian vampire can be found in the novella Carmilla, which, incidentally, is set in Styria. In Thomas Hörl’s film F.W.M. Symphonie, her successor Nosferatu attempts to replace Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s stolen head.
The exhibition Queer Immortality is open from 2 October 2026 to 24 January 2027, Thursday through Sunday from 2:00 to 6:00 pm.
Admission is free. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive programme of educational activities and events.
Curator: Barba Stöhr | Artists: Peter Kozek, LA GEORGETTA, Heti Prack, Siggi Sekira, Florian Aschka, Danielle Pamp, Julia Fuchs, Berivan Sayici, Luis Javier Murillo, Thomas Hörl, Thomas Schoiswohl with activists, HEATHERS
🖼️ Exhibition
📅 When? 02.10.26 bis 24.01.27
💬 Language: English and German
📍 Where? QUEER MUSEUM VIENNA | Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Vienna
💶 Free admission, donations are welcome
This event is supported by:
