exhibition
DON'T SKIP !
Farah Barakat & Anna Khodorkovskaya
10/11/2025 – 10/01/2026
curated by Christine Bruckbauer and Aline Lenzhofer
Opening: Monday, November 10, 2025, 7 pm
Workshop: Friday, November 14, 2025, 5-7 pm
Venue: philomena+ project room, Heinestraße 40, 1020 Vienna
Farah Barakat and Anna Khodorkovskaya, Don‘t Skip!, Collage of the artists’ works, 2025.
There is a moment the finger hesitates—half-scrolling, half-stuck. The horror of what is shown, and the numbness of what follows.
In the exhibition Don’t Skip! Farah Barakat and Anna Khodorkovsakya present newly produced bodies of work that disturb the smoothness of official narratives. Working from screenshots pulled from social media, the artists reflect on how power is performed and how violence is normalized. Their works do not aim to clarify. They distort. Repeat. Linger. They reflect the rhythm of forgetting and the cost of witnessing without power.
Don’t Skip! confronts the visual noise we absorb and the distance we create to survive it. Don’t Skip! is not a plea. It’s a fracture. A disruption in tempo. A screen-grabbed breath held too long. It’s what happens when the feed spills over into the body—quietly, uninvited, unresolved.
The exhibition is part of the Vienna Art Week 2025.
artists
(*1996 in Alexandria, lives and works in Cairo) is a painter and mixed media artist. Since completing her BA in Visual Arts from The American University in Cairo in 2018 she has exhibited her work in group exhibitions at numerous Cairo venues including Darb1718, Sharjah Art Gallery, Medrar for Contemporary Art, Soma Gallery, Tahrir Cultural Center, and Art d’Egypte. Her work was also included in the London showcase of the King Tut Collective with the Egyptian Culture Bureau. Farah Barakat reflects on subtle aspects of the human experience. In her exploration of self, surroundings, and human dynamics she conjures up an alternative reality, which reflects in her experimental handling of mediums. Her intuitive approach to painting combines with manipulating and distorting raw materials such as unprimed fabrics, different types of clay, cement and gypsum. The process of layering is an invitation to look beneath the surface and ponder distorted narratives that challenge the ‘truth’ of memory and its elusive nature. The interconnectedness of memory and identity is a central theme in her work which ponders the interplay of gain, loss, choice, and transformation over time that shapes identities in the contemporary world.
ANNA KHODORKOVSKAYA
(*1985 in Moscow, lives and works in Vienna) studied printmaking at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts from 2003-2008 and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2011-2018. In 2014 she received the prestigious Strabag International Art Award, in 2018 the Recognition Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts for her diploma and in 2021 she won the Prize of the Province of Carinthia at the 37th Austrian Printmaking Competition. She has been invited to numerous residency programmes, exhibits nationally and internationally and implements projects in public spaces. Her main media are mosaic, painting, drawing and watercolour. However, the artist also works witu installations, participatory projects and in various artist collectives. Her works are exhibited internationally, performed and installed in public spaces.
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