SUCK MY CODE! at Exhibit Galerie, Vienna

SUCK MY CODE! by Anna Ehrenstein & House of Tupamaras, Anan Fries, Anja Lekavski & Rosanna Marie Pondorf, Christiane Peschek, Patrícia J. Reis, Sophie Thun, RA Walden, VNS Matrix, curated by Rosanna Marie Pondorf and Mareike Schwarz, at Exhibit Galerie, Vienna, 6.11.2025–8.2.2026.

As we cross the threshold of the exhibition, a blunt, almost childlike choice comes back to us, spit or swallow. The thought arrives before looking really begins, like a conditioned reflex, while the air seems to vibrate with a held tension. In a time when FLINTA* bodies are constantly translated into data, over sexualized to the point of exhaustion or erased with equal efficiency, we find ourselves asking who is speaking, and in what language. The answer never takes the form of a manifesto. Instead, it appears as interference, an error that forces us to slow down, to remain inside the question.

The space of Exhibit Galerie is permeated by an unstable light, never purely functional, guiding visitors through a deliberately non linear path. Movement feels like navigating a system that refuses optimization, detours are necessary, backtracking inevitable, pauses unavoidable in front of works that seem to look back at us. The circulation of bodies is never neutral, it becomes an integral part of the exhibition, another layer of material. Digital and analog forms coexist without striving for reconciliation, instead they brush against and contradict one another, making visible how deeply technology is entangled with our physical existence.

The artworks, spanning from twentieth century net art to contemporary practices, treat the medium as something alive and vulnerable. Code is bent, stressed, rendered porous. The glitch operates as a form of aesthetic stretching, exposing what usually remains concealed beneath the smooth surface of interfaces. Machines are not domesticated here, they are occupied, squatted, turned into ambiguous presences that are at once analytical and poetic. Within this friction, the internal contradictions produced by external oppression come into focus, alongside resistant forms of desire, gestures of care, and tentative alliances. The body is never fixed, it is decoded only to become fluid again, unstable, reopened.

There is no clear sense of exit, only a state of suspension. What lingers is a sensation difficult to file away, like the low echo of a sound or the residual warmth of a screen just switched off. SUCK MY CODE! continues to work beneath the skin, insisting that within error and distortion a shared space of resistance can emerge, where the system slows down and something, at last, becomes perceptible.