VIENNA.- Vienna Art Week’s eleventh edition presented the city’s art scene with a top-class program ranging from the Baroque to contemporary experimentation. Its motto Creating Common Good was all about current social issues and the public good.

From the big exhibition houses, museums and art universities to the galleries and independent art spaces: for a week, around 70 program partners welcomed art lovers to exhibition openings, guided tours, talks, lectures, film screenings, and performances. An amazing 35,000 visitors to approximately 200 events once again proved Vienna Art Week to be a crowd-puller.

Highlights of the one-week art festival included the special exhibition “Creating Common Good” (Kunst Haus Wien), the opening of a Vija Celmins exhibition at Secession, Olafur Eliasson’s show “Baroque Baroque” at The Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, and a lecture by renowned US sociologist Saskia Sassen, who warned of the lack of common good.

To Robert Punkenhofer, Artistic Director of Vienna Art Week, the art week’s motto is a call to action: “The issue of common good gets more and more pressing every day. Art and its institutions can contribute by creating spaces that enable us to address sociopolitical issues from a critical perspective. The exhibition Creating Common Good gives an impressive overview of the variety of artistic approaches to the issue.”

As part of the annual Curators’ Picks series, international curators are invited to Vienna to get in touch and exchange views with the local art scene. Çelenk Bafra, chief curator of the İstanbul Museum of Modern Art, on this year’s art week: “Vienna Art Week managed to create a solid international platform of critical discourse and artistic practice. It raised a good amount of questions to reflect on social responsibility of art professionals and brought up a variety of critically engaged artistic practice focusing on collectiveness, co-existence and cooperation. After all, isn’t that what we expect from a successful art event: to bring forth possibilities and potentialities of artistic practice so that we will not only move on but also move forward and make a difference?”

Vienna Art Week’s most popular program highlights once again included Open Studio Day, with 72 artists opening their studios to the interested public. The art festival was topped off on Sunday with newly established Family Art Day, which also proved a crowd-pleaser.

“Vienna Art Week was a big success. Its top-class events and creativeness are extremely helpful in developing and internationalizing Vienna’s art scene,” says Martin Böhm, President of Art Cluster Vienna, the host of the festival.