Transindigenous Assembly
A Performative Evening with Joulia Strauss
Film Screening & Convivial Discussion with Prof. Elke Krasny
Moderation: Panagis Marketos
Tuesday, 16 June 2026, 18:00
What does it mean to claim a site? To reoccupy it, inhabit it on different terms, and insist, through art, through the body, through collective practice, on other uses for spaces that institutional power has long sought to fix and contain?
On 16 June, Queer Museum Vienna invites you to an evening with artist and activist Joulia Strauss, structured around the screening of her documentary film Transindigenous Assembly and a live performative session by the artist.
Transindigenous Assembly is a documentary traversing several distinct communities and knowledge traditions, with Strauss serving as narrator and interlocutor. The film follows queer Aboriginal and Indigenous artists and their practices of constructing a liveable life: figures who have remained in or returned to their Indigenous communities; teachers whose work on light is as rigorous as it is precise; Aboriginal cultural workers whose artistic practice has been a primary means of self-determination; Amazonian curanderas who sustain their work despite the accelerating commodification of shamanic knowledge. Refusing the conditions imposed on them by colonial systems, they have constructed lives worth living. The film proposes an epistemic and pedagogical reorientation, a way of rethinking how education, governance, and collective life might be organised when existing systems have failed and public goods have been privatised.
At 18:00 the screening begins (90 min.), after which the audience is invited into a convivial discussion with Strauss and Professor Elke Krasny, joined by members of the Queer Museum collective.
The opening and closing sequences of the film are explicitly connected to the Avtonomi Akadimia project at Plato’s Academy in Athens, a site whose history of contested use, unresolved heritage status, and ongoing urban transformation shares, across significant differences, structural conditions with the Otto Wagner Areal, the current context of Queer Museum and one of Vienna`s largest sites of active urban transformation. This parallel between two sites shaped by institutional power and held in tension between official designation and active reinvention affords a productive trans-local framework for the evening’s conversation.
The discussion will be guided by a question the film raises without resolving: how do queer and feminist practices of reclaiming and reactivating sites become legible and transferable? How do they accumulate as resources, conceptual, political, and practical, for communities working from within spaces that are themselves still contested? We invite a conversation that departs from the film’s specific content toward these broader questions, as well as what such practices might mean for the actual conditions of the Otto Wagner Areal, or other contested urban ecosystems.
The very name, Transindigenous Assembly is also a proposition: to imagine non-identitarian political collectivity, to address isolation through gathering, and to practise forms of collective care.
Joulia Strauss is an Indigenous Mari artist and activist, living and working between Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, and video works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Tate Modern in London, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, ZKM Karlsruhe, and documenta14, among others. She is the founder and organiser of Avtonomi Akadimia in Athens.
Elke Krasny is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and an internationally recognised scholar of feminist spatial practice, curatorial theory, and critical urbanism.
Picture Credit: Stil from the film Transindigenous Assembly, 2025, Joulia Strauss, in collaboration with Marc Müller
🖼️ Screening and Discussion
📅 When? 16.06. at 18:00
💬 Language: Englisch
📍 Where? QUEER MUSEUM VIENNA | Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Vienna
📩 no registration necessary
💶 free admission, donations are welcome
This event is supported by:
