KEN OKIISHI · JOHANNES PORSCH · TANJA WIDMANN: Derivatives Affaires at Schleuse, Vienna

KEN OKIISHI · JOHANNES PORSCH · TANJA WIDMANN: Derivatives Affaires at Schleuse, Vienna 05/09/2025–27/09/2025.

Every now and then, we ask ourselves, what does “production” really mean today? Not in abstract terms, but right there, faced with a sheet of paper, a sliver of metal, a printed image. What unfolds between the one who creates and the one who receives? Where does the gesture reside that turns an action into a work, a relationship into visible matter? At Schleuse in Vienna, Derivatives Affaires, an exhibition conceived and “produced by” Tanja Widmann, featuring works by Ken Okiishi, Johannes Porsch, and Widmann herself, unfolds as a delicate network of references, slippages, repetitions, and disjunctions, a fragile yet precise montage that, from September 5 to 27, 2025, questions the viewer at every step.

The atmosphere, as soon as we enter, is restrained. Neutral lighting. No dominant sound, except when Okiishi’s video takes over and resets the room. There are only four works, yet they don’t compete for space, they modulate it. Each is a presence, placed without visible hierarchy, and their impact lies in the intervals between them, in the time it takes to read them. A pencil drawing (Detail 1:1, 2025) by Johannes Porsch meets us first, modest and economical, drawn on Standard White Economy paper, 29.7 × 21 cm, bureaucratic in size, but not in tone. We lean closer, as if we’re glimpsing something not meant for us. Just beyond, an inkjet print (Girlfriends (Tom), 2025) by Tanja Widmann on Steinbeis Nr. 3 paper, same format, different register. The image opens, showing faces or traces of faces, like affective relationships caught at the moment they cease to be personal and start becoming object.

Then there’s the small metal object (Sample, 2025), also produced by Widmann and Porsch, galvanized steel, barely 8.3 × 1.5 × 1.7 cm. It resembles an industrial remnant, or a discarded fragment of architecture. Nothing about it claims aesthetic value, the metal reflects light with uneasy modesty, as though trying not to exist. And finally, Okiishi’s film Vital Behaviors (2019), 64 minutes of color and sound. Once it begins, the room thickens, time stretches, and the other works recede into the periphery of consciousness. But they don’t disappear, they echo through the edit. The film isn’t just narrative, it’s a recording of movements, a bodily current that redefines production as an existential practice.

What strikes us is how these works, so diverse in media and format, seem to derive from one another. There’s no claim to originality, no binary of original and copy, just transitions, image to object, drawing to print, material to residue. Everything is “derivative,” not in a diminished sense, but as an affirmation that nothing exists in isolation. The exhibition reflects on this, produced by is not a credit line, but an open-ended protocol, a way of tracing the forces that act between people, between bodies, across surfaces.

Derivatives Affaires forces us to look at what’s between things. It’s not about grasping each individual work, but about inhabiting their interrelations. It doesn’t simply exhibit, it reassembles. Materials previously shown in London, Berlin, Munich, and now Vienna return here in an expanded montage. There’s no beginning, no ending, just variations, returns, omissions.

Derivatives Affaires asks us to cross through relationships, to disarm systems, to overload circuits. And perhaps, in the invisible exchange between viewer and producer, something has indeed shifted inside us, once again.