KLIMA BIENNALE WIEN

Language creates space — this idea is at the heart of the festival center for the Klima Biennale Wien 2026 at KunstHausWien. As the festival's central hub, which ran from April 9 to May 10, 2026, KunstHausWien served as an anchor point for exhibitions, events, and encounter — and at the same time as a site of poetic spatial language. Not explanation, but design: words become carriers of meaning, surface, body. Together with the writer Andrea Grill, a dialogue between text and space emerged in which language itself becomes material — translating the guiding theme Unspeakable Worlds into a walkable, atmospheric experience.

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The starting point is the circle: as the path of the sun, as a planetary trace, as the oldest form of orientation. From this ideal figure we developed various formations in which text and space meet. Circles overlap, touch one another, form fields and densities — from sign to movement, from center to constellation. We drew abstractly on the visual identity of the Biennale and lifted it off the surface: typographic elements were transferred into material and space, colors stretched, letters set against sculptural bodies.

In KunstHausWien, text appears as trace, imprint, gesture — milled, embossed, painted over. Some interventions whisper, barely perceptible within the material; others speak clearly as sculptural statements. Language runs as a connecting thread through the exterior, foyer, stairwell, and courtyard: it receives, accompanies, and transforms.

A mobile element extends the design as a conceptual expansion — foldable layers that temporarily mark sites across the city and create connections between the festival center and its outlying locations.

The festival center as a walkable collage of atmospheres, voices, and rhythms — a space that writes, reads, and keeps writing. Where the possible begins to whisper.

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