Basement Dances: Vienna - Bombay - London

[Opening the Brackets] of Memory, Cazadores, Buenos Aires, ARG August 2026

1905 -2001, Vienna - Bombay - London (Video, C.Kappenberg 2026, 12.45min)

The video dives into the archive of Viennese born Jewish dancer, choreographer and pedagogue Hilde Holger. Technical disruptions in the digital media such as dropouts, colour artefacting and glitches impact the viewing experience but also function as a 21st century version of a dance Holger performed in 1926 entitled Mechanical Ballet. As a visible signature of what we might call the archive’s technological bodies - the physical tapes, the magnetic heads and the aging circuitry - they reflect both the vulnerability of the archive itself and the repeated ruptures, displacements and traumatic aspects of the story they were enlisted to record. Literally interrupting the flow of the transmission of sound and images and a kind of involuntary witness to loss, they also mark the places where the archive cannot, and perhaps should not, fully recover what is missing.

The video also explores a dance Holger was keen to reconstruct in the 1990s called Ahasver, The Wanderer, which Holger performed originally in 1936 in Vienna prior to her escape to India. Once construed as an antisemitic projection, the notion of Ahasver reflects divisive politics but is also being claimed and reclaimed in different contexts. For Holger it signified a collective condition of displacement and alienation, also encapsulating her own unsettled condition as a carrier of memory who perhaps never fully arrived.

[Opening the Brackets] of Memory, Cazadores, Buenos Aires, ARG. 28 July – 1 August 2026

The exhibition [Opening the Brackets] of Memory brings together the works of fourteen international artists, addressing democracy and memory as relevant themes beyond the human and inherent in landscapes, materials, and the “other-than-human”. It opens at Fundación Cazadores on 27th July 2026 (6 - 10 pm) with an evening reception that features the performance Dear Daddy… by artist Janina Moninska, an intervention built around letters written to and by her father, a political prisoner and camp survivor. The performance continues throughout the week: on Thursday and Friday, from 6 - 7 pm. How do objects and gestures hold, and speak with and about, memories? Artist Franziska Windolf reflects on this question, as part of her workshop "Mapping 2: Memory Beings" on 30th July (5-5.45pm). The exhibition concludes on 1st August 2026 (4-8pm) with a final performance by Javier Alfonso Ormeño Castro, titled Memories in a Cup of Tea, which invites the audience to reflect on the domestic, ritualistic, and ephemeral dimensions of memory.

Participating artists:  Katy Beinart, Olga Bubich, Gabriela Cassano, Javier Alfonso Ormeño Castro, Monika Gabriela Dorniak, Claudia Kappenberg, Mirta Kupferminc, Rosell Meseguer, Nela Milic, Janina Moninska, Viviana Romay, Grace Schwindt, Milagro Torreblanca and Franziska Windolf

Curatorial team:  Olga Bubich, Monika Gabriela Dorniak, Mirta Kupferminc and Rebecca Harris