artist talk

PERFORMING CRITIQUE

with the artists Lisa Großkopf, Patricia J. Reis, Mehrta Shirzadian, moderated by curator Nadine Khalil (curator-in-residence at PART)

Wednesday, 26/08/2026, 7 pm
Venue: philomena+, Heinestraße 40, 1020 Vienna

Lisa Großkopf, Lazy Artist At Work, 2026, Video still, HD (Color/Sound), 5:29min

Artist Talk: Performing Critique, led by independent critic and curator Nadine Khalil, currently in residence at PART, brings together Vienna-based artists Lisa Großkopf, Patricia J. Reis and Mehrta Shirzadian to consider how they use performance to examine the systems that place demands on their labour and artistic production. Their practices interrogate the pressures of self-optimisation and marketability in the art world, the technological amplification of sensory perception and bodily capacities, and microbial processes that act as agents within the body. Together, these practices examine how neoliberal and institutional infrastructures shape what bodies can do and how they are valued. They ask how human, technological and microscopic bodies are regulated and controlled within systems of power, and how performance can reconfigure these hierarchies through humor, slowing down or performing otherwise.

artists

LISA GROSSKOPF

(born 1989 in Vienna) lives and works in Vienna. Her work has been shown at multiple venues, including Ars Electronica, Belvedere 21, and the Kunsthaus Graz, with international exhibitions in Amsterdam, München, Prague, Tehran, and elsewhere. She has undertaken residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Joshibi AIR in Tokyo, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam in Havana. She was awarded the grant for emerging artists by the Austrian Federal Chancellery, the Gabriele Heidecker Prize and the Fred-Adlmüller grant. Her works can be found in public collections such as Wien Museum and Museum of Applied Arts Frankfurt.

PATRICIA J. REIS

MEHRTA SHIRZADIAN

curator

NADINE KHALIL

is a Lebanese curator, critic, and editor moving between Dubai and elsewhere. Her work engages writing, exhibition-making, and collaboration with artists who critically engage with ecology, feminism and technology. Her practice centers on questions of performativity and the body (understood as physical, ecological, and technological), taking an embodied sensibility to curatorial and critical work. She edited The Arts Center: Building a Performing Arts Community on Saadiyat Island (NYU Abu Dhabi, 2023) and has contributed to Art Review Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, Brooklyn Rail, Financial Times, Frieze, Ocula, and the Women’s Review of Books, among others