SALZBURG.- FOTOHOF has opened Still Performing, an exhibition that brings together the work of Florian Aschka & Larissa Kopp, Andy Kassier and Milena Wojhan, three artistic positions in which photography and performance are deeply intertwined.
The exhibition opened on June 11, 2026, and continues through July 30, 2026, at FOTOHOF in Salzburg. Rather than treating photography simply as a record of a performance, Still Performing looks at the photograph as a stage, a place where gestures, costumes, poses and social roles are constructed, questioned and transformed.
The title plays on the word “still,” suggesting both the photographic still image and the idea of an action that continues over time. In this sense, the works on view are not static images, but traces of ongoing performative processes. They explore how identity is shaped through repeated physical, social and cultural actions, and how gender, belonging and social roles are performed in everyday life.
At the center of the exhibition is a shared concern with visibility: who is allowed to be seen, under what conditions, and through which codes. The artists use masks, costumes, staged settings, repetition and exaggeration to challenge established narratives and expose the pressures of social conformity.
Andy Kassier examines the performance of success, masculinity and authenticity. Under the motto “Success is just a smile away,” Kassier has developed a long-term artistic persona that parodies ideas of wealth, self-optimization and social advancement. In photographs such as White Horse, Just Swinging and Mr. Getty, he appears as a businessman in tailored suits, fur coats, luxury settings and carefully selected backdrops associated with global prestige.
His works often circulate on Instagram, where the platform itself becomes part of the performance. Kassier’s images build a continuing narrative of self-invention, turning social media into a digital stage for the construction of identity. At the same time, the photographs are presented as luxurious image objects, with hand-polished metal frames that mirror the culture of status and display they critique.
Florian Aschka & Larissa Kopp approach performance and photography from a queer-feminist perspective. Their photo-performances are staged actions created specifically for the camera, often taking place in public, historical or institutional spaces. Rather than focusing on a single image, their works unfold through sequences and series that make choreography, movement and collective presence visible.
In Queer Revolutionaries...?, representative spaces such as the ceremonial staircase of the Neue Burg and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna become charged stages for political and visual intervention. The artists draw on the language of classical revolutionary painting, echoing its gestures of resistance and uprising. Their performers appear in hairdressing capes, streaking caps and tight-fitting costumes associated with beauty culture and self-optimization, while masks with stereotypical heteronormative features merge with the body to create gender-hybrid identities.
Their work moves between resistance and adaptation. While the figures symbolically occupy spaces of power, they also remain entangled in social norms and body images. The photographs ask how queer visibility can operate within existing systems of representation, and what forms of political self-staging remain possible inside those structures.
In Dirty Godesses/Freud and the secret cabinet*, Aschka & Kopp turn to Sigmund Freud’s collection of antiquities and the cultural and psychoanalytic narratives attached to it. The work questions patriarchal and heteronormative ideas of gender and sexuality that shaped many of Freud’s theories. Queer bodies are staged against ancient settings, wearing costumes printed with images of archaeological objects, including phallic amulets and satyrs. These costumes also appear in the exhibition space and can be worn by visitors, extending the performance beyond the photographic image.
Milena Wojhan’s work also deals with cultural projections, body images and the possibility of transformation. Through masks, prosthetics and staged actions, she creates images of bodies that challenge inherited myths and social expectations.
In Lupa, made in collaboration with makeup artist Maxi Schwarzkopf, Wojhan revisits the Roman founding myth of Romulus and Remus, who were said to have been raised by a she-wolf. The work begins with an alternative interpretation of the word “Lupa,” not as a wolf but as a prostitute. By embodying this figure, Wojhan examines how femininity and cultural narratives are rewritten, coded and controlled over time.
Other works, including Artist Portrait (Approved) and The Haters, address gendered visibility and the way bodies are reduced to sexualized signs. In Artist Portrait (Approved), a penis prosthesis replaces the nose, ironically pointing to the historically male image of the artist as genius. In The Haters, the face of a woman disappears behind an oversized breast prosthesis, suggesting how individuality can be obscured by projected ideas of the body.
In I really, really love paradise, Wojhan presents photographs that grew out of a performance of the same name. The images show the artist wearing a grotesque zombie mask with the word “tired” written beneath one eye. Another series shows the same figure falling in front of a green screen. The work reflects on artistic self-staging, emotional exhaustion and the precarious conditions of cultural production.
The connection between live performance and photographic staging came into focus during the opening with Wojhan’s performance Too Much, presented only on that evening. Unlike the photographic works, which transform performative actions into images, Too Much brought the technical and performative conditions of photography back into the space of live action.
Running alongside Still Performing, FOTOHOF>STUDIO has also opened the Wolf Suschitzky Photo Prize 2025. The exhibition features works by this year’s winners, Andrej Polukord from Austria and Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang from the United Kingdom, along with nominated photographers from both countries.
The theme of this year’s prize was inspired by the opening words of Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players...” Established in 2018 by the Austrian Cultural Forum London after the death of Wolf Suschitzky, the prize supports photographers living in Austria or the United Kingdom. The FOTOHOF>ARCHIV houses Suschitzky’s estate, making the Salzburg presentation a collaboration between FOTOHOF and the Austrian Cultural Forum London.
Together, the exhibitions place photography in direct conversation with performance, identity and the staging of the self. They ask how images shape the way people appear in public, how bodies carry social expectations, and how artists can use performance to interrupt the roles that society assigns.
