SALZBURG.- There was a time when one’s status as verifiably human could be taken for granted. Today, however, the question seems no longer “Are you human?” but rather “Can you be perceived as human?”

In the age of machine-mediated recognition, being human is not an ontological given but a bureaucratic achievement: a status granted, measured, and confirmed through algorithmic thresholds. This is encapsulated in the peculiar moment when humans must prove their humanity to a machine. Known as the CAPTCHA test—an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”—this authentication requirement was introduced in the early 2000s as a security measure. Since that time, the demands this test makes on its users have varied from deciphering distorted letters and identifying traffic lights in a grid of blurry photographs, to classifying objects within AI-generated images. Beneath this banal appearance, CAPTCHA tracks the shifting conditions of recognition in the digital age, staging the gap between what life produces and what the system can acknowledge as real.

Taking these considerations as its starting point, Salzburger Kunstverein’s 2026 programme “CAPTCHA Realism” explores the politics of perception and the synthetic constitution of identity. Building on the 2025 curatorial framework “Picturing Justice”, this new chapter focuses on the figure of the human not as a stable entity but as a project of infrastructural and aesthetic legibility.

Exhibition and performance programme:

March 7–November 29, 2026
Kateryna Lysovenko—Ring Gallery

In this special commission, supported by ERSTE Foundation, Kateryna Lysovenko touches on the ruptures of war and the contested visibility of images in times of political emergency.

March 7–May 10, 2026
Linda Lach—Grand Hall / Magdalena Berger—Studio

Linda Lach turns the Grand Hall into what she describes as “the great neutral matter”— an affective space where perception blurs and meaning becomes viscous. In the Studio Space, Salzburg-based Magdalena Berger reflects on the figure of the gatekeeper as an embodied analogue to contemporary verification systems.

May 23–July 12, 2026
Agnes Scherer—Grand Hall / freakygreenfish—Studio

In the Grand Hall, a major new installation by Agnes Scherer transforms two paintings by Francisco Goya into a walk-in theatrical environment, an expanded tableau of social ritual and manipulation. Vienna-based freakygreenfish occupies the Studio Space with FrameTokCity: Bot on Bot Crime (2026), an immersive urban simulation that borrows from “dark forest” internet theory to pit AI-generated TikTok bots against one another.

June 10 & June 12, 2026
Deva Schubert—Ring Gallery

A new production by Salzburger Kunstverein and SZENE Salzburg, Deva Schubert’s performance lets two bodies and two voices glitch into semantic collapse.

July 25–September 20, 2026
Ryan Gander—Grand Hall / Hac Vinent—Studio

Developed especially for the Kunstverein, Ryan Gander’s large-scale installation One Hundred Things Twice comprises paired objects and their accompanying stories, unfolding a spatial grammar of repetition, difference, and interpretive drift. In the Studio Space, Hac Vinent presents a video installation that addresses the construction of identity through the lenses of posthuman embodiment.

August 5 & August 12, 2026
The Distribution of Luck—various locations / Gernot Wieland, Filipka Rutkowska, Harun Morrison, and Urok Shirhan

In August, Salzburger Kunstverein joins forces with the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts to present The Distribution of Luck. Co-curated by Mirela Baciak and Denis Maksimov, this programme brings together four lecture performances by artists exploring love, class, money, and identity.

October 3–November 22, 2025
Members Exhibition: HER—Grand Hall, curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini / Peter Schreiner—Studio

The annual members’ exhibition is guest-curated by the Vienna-based curator and writer Attilia Fattori Franchini, who will develop a thematic group exhibition selected through an open call. Concurrently, we present the work of Peter Schreiner, the winner of the 2025 Art Development Award.

December 12, 2026–February 21, 2027
Aline Bouvy—Grand Hall, Studio and Ring Gallery

The programme concludes with a major solo exhibition by Aline Bouvy, developed in collaboration with Casino Luxembourg. Following her presentation at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Bouvy will occupy the Kunstverein with an immersive look into abjection, corporeality, and the precarious architectures of contemporary subjectivity from a feminist perspective.

The programme is conceptualised and curated [unless stated otherwise] by Salzburger Kunstverein’s director-curator Mirela Baciak.