Landscapes of Unrest: Bodies, Memories, Revolt
Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova, Olia Sosnovskaya
Image: Olia Sosnovskaya, “Białowieża Forest (song)”, still from the performance, 2025.
An exhibition of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2025-26
curated by: Barbara Mahlknecht
EXHIBITION DATES:
22 May – 1 August 2026
KUNSTPAVILLON
Rennweg 8a, 6020 Innsbruck
The exhibition brings together works by the 2025–26 Fellows Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova and Olia Sosnovskaya. The artists explore forms of resistance and memory within the tensions of imperialism, extraction and colonial-capitalist violence, past and present. They examine how bodies, landscapes and architectural ruins act as witnesses and become sites of unrest and uprising.
Bita Bell’s work engages with solo protest performances in public space through writing and movement and understands choreography as a pattern of social behavior, revealing how orientation, stillness, duration, repetition, and traces reorganize relations between bodies, spaces, and their powers. Kandis Friesen traces the material and ephemeral remains of the former Soviet Gulag Karlag in Karaganda, closed in 1959, where architecture, landscape and sound carry and transmit historical memory; Jeanna Kolesova’s filmic work approaches wetlands and marshes as ecological, political and cultural archives of violent destruction and potential resilience, embodied in the figure of the Swamp Spirit; and Olia Sosnovskaya’s research engages the Białowieża Forest as a contested historical space shaped by imperial decline, partisan resistance and the so-called refugee crisis since 2021, exploring it as an archive of extraction and border regimes as well as a site of knowledge and revolt.
The exhibition shows how collective and individual memory persists in bodies, landscapes, architectures as well as in oral histories, songs and ghostly traces, and how, not least through artistic imagination, it can become a force of unrest, uprising and resistance.
Opening
Thursday, 21.05.2026, 6:30 pm
Bita Bell is a dance artist, composer, and writer, based in Vienna. Her practice is grounded in the concepts of the body as an archive, focusing on the intersections of collective memory and individual narrative. She was a Fellow at THIRD DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, recipient of the Scholarship for Dance and Music from the Austrian Federal Ministry, as well as the danceWEB Scholarship at ImPulsTanz Festival. Her recent performance The Sun Is Gone premiered at and in co-production with TanzQuartier Wien.
https://bitabell.com
Kandis Friesen works with the disintegrating and dispersed monumental. Her recent work in video, sculpture, sound, and installation uses history as a central material, building provisional structures for resonance, repositioning, and disrepair. She often works in modes of grafting and re-publication (making something public, again), amplifying site-specific histories and the structures which hold and transmit them. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at Galerie im Turm (Berlin), Kunst im Stadtraum (Berlin), Odesa National Fine Arts Museum (Odesa), CAFKA Biennial of Art in Public Space (Waterloo), Roman Susan, at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Montréal), MIX (NYC), Jihlava IDFF (Jihlava), and Images Festival (Toronto). Friesen’s work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies at Rupert, Bemis Centre, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien. She is from Winnipeg and Montréal, and lives in Berlin.
Jeanna Kolesova is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. Their work examines the manipulation of history and collective memory, as well as the impact of imperial infrastructures on human and non-human bodies and landscapes.
Kolesova studied documentary film and photography in St. Petersburg, interactive media at CalArts, and experimental film and new media at the Berlin University of the Arts. Their practice spans film, video installations, performance lectures, and writing, weaving together personal and collective narratives to demythologize dominant nationalist and colonial narratives.
Kolesova’s work has been supported by the Karl Hofer Scholarship (2023), the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2024), Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt (2024), Schloss Wiepersdorf (2025), and the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship (2025–2027). Recent exhibitions include the Brücke Museum, Berlin (2025), Fotograf Festival, Prague (2024), Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2024), nGbK, Berlin (2023), EMOP Berlin (2023), HYBRID Biennale, Dresden (2022), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2021), and the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin (2021).
https://jeannakolesova.com/
Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist, writer and cultural organiser born in Minsk, Belarus, based in Vienna, Austria. Her artistic and research practice intertwines performance, visual arts, text- and workshop-based activities, addressing forms of political organizing, protest choreographies, movement scores and intersections of festivity and the political. Member of WHPH / Decentric Circles self-organised platform https://workhardplay.pw/ and the artistic-research group Problem Collective, focused on strikes, archives, reading practices and tools for engagement with overseen histories and social struggles https://problemcollective.org/. Currently a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Her individual and collective works were presented in Kunsthalle Wien, e-flux, Tanzquartier Wien, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Kyiv Biennial, Biennale Matter of Art (Prague), HKW (Berlin), HAU (Berlin), Manifesta Biennial (Kosovo), documenta fifteen, among others.
Location
Kunstpavillon