PREMSTÄTTEN.- The Austrian Sculpture Park invites artists annually to create temporary works that engage with the landscape and its layered history in poetic and critical ways. For the 2025 edition, Vienna-based artist Christian Kosmas Mayer is presenting a multifaceted project entitled Zeit, Zuwendung und Raum (Time, Care and Space).

At the heart of the installation is an extraordinary artifact: a petrified tree trunk, around 20 million years old, from whose hollow interior a young tree is growing upwards. Over the next few decades, this Manna ash (Fraxinus ornus) will gradually merge with the ancient fossil.

Its natural life-span is roughly one century, the same hundred-year period during which the adjacent time capsule will lie buried close to this sculptural ensemble.

This stainless-steel capsule contains a message from the artist that is both a technological innovation and a philosophical gesture. Rather than being written on paper or stored digitally, Mayer’s message is encoded as a DNA sequence. Using a cutting-edge process, the genetic material is enclosed within tiny, robust stainless-steel capsules designed for long-term preservation. These capsules are stabilized using an argon-filled atmosphere and protective layers that shield the DNA from moisture, oxygen and other environmental influences. The exact contents of the message are not intended for the present generation—they remain deliberately hidden, intended solely for people in the future.

In this project, Mayer draws on the ideas of Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast (1945–98), who designed the Austrian Sculpture Park for the 2000 International Garden Exhibition. For Kienast, gardens and parks were “poetic places of our past, present, and future,” places not only of memory but also of new imagination. Mayer’s project can be seen as a continuation of these ideas: it consciously embraces time as a material and medium and intertwines distinct temporal dimensions–geological deep time, the biological time of life, and the projected time of cultural-technological imagination–making them physically and poetically tangible.

Christian Kosmas Mayer’s artistic practice is grounded in research and operates at the intersection of technology, memory, and care. He traces forgotten biographies, artifacts, and ecologies, and recontextualizes them through a wide range of artistic media. His installations, sculptures, and performances transform archival fragments into sensual environments, where linear time dissolves and alternative visions of the future emerge. Mayer sees his artistic practice as a form of affirmative biopolitics: he lets life persist where dominant narratives have long drawn a final line and invites the public to assume responsibility for these fragile pasts and their possible continuations.

The first Austrian Sculpture Park was established in 2003 on the site of the former International Garden Show. The park’s landscape architecture is in dialogue with contemporary sculptures. Today, over 80 permanent sculptures by renowned national and international artists can be found in an ever-changing dialoge of art and nature.

Director and Curator: Gabriele Mackert