Jury 2023 – 2025

Sonja Huber studied art history in Vienna and Berlin and has been head of the Department of Fine Arts and Media Art at the City of Vienna Culture (MA 7) since 2018. Prior to this, she worked in various positions in cultural management, including from 2000 to 2004 in the collection and exhibition management of the Collection of Contemporary Art of the City of Vienna and from 2005 to 2007 as exhibition coordinator and curator at the Kunsthalle Krems. From 2007 to 2012 she was production manager at KÖR Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien and from 2013/2014 at departure - Creative Agency of the City of Vienna as head of the funding programmes departure_pioneer and departure_experts and coordinated network activities for the creative industries. Among other things, she was responsible for the implementation of artistic-architectural competitions and worked on the departure study "Spaces of Creative Use. Potentials for Vienna". In 2015/16 she took over as head of the Art | Research | Service at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and was responsible for xhibit - Exhibition Space for Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as exhibition coordinator from 2016 to 2018.

Folke Köbberling studied fine arts and architecture at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Köbberling has taught at various universities such as London's Royal College of Art and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena since 2006. Since 2016, she has been head of the Institute for Architecture-Related Art at the TU Braunschweig. Her artistic works have been repeatedly awarded and shown in international exhibition venues. Folke Köbberling was a member of the expert commission Art in Public Space Lower Austria from 2013 to 2016 and has been a member of the board of trustees of IBA`27 since 2018.
Folke Köbberling deals with the urban environment and its transience as a reflection of general social processes. In spatial and sculptural site-specific interventions, she addresses issues about public space, grassroots participation and self-organization, the market economy, mobility, housing, sustainability, and resource scarcity, all of which have inherent potential for social conflict. As forms of resistance against our appropriation by the excesses of the prevailing neoliberal economic order, individualized automotive transport as a hegemonic leading culture she comments with her artistic means, developing intervention models for urban space, thereby calling into question the conventional handling of urban architecture in a subtle, and often humorous and ephemeral way.

Dr. phil. Annette Maechtel lives and works as an independent curator, lecturer and cultural/art scientist in Berlin. Since 2020, she is the managing director of the Berlin art association neue Gesellschaft für bildenden Kunst (nGbK). Several of her exhibition and research projects dealt with Berlin as a political and discursive space. Among others, die stadt von morgen - Beiträge zu einer Archäologie des Hansaviertels Berlin 2007 at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Together with Heimo Lattner she was editor of ibid. Szenische Lesungen aus Dokumenten der Berliner Stadt- und Kulturpolitik from 2015-2019. From 2017 to 2019 she was scientific Team member in the Einstein research project "Autonomie und Funktionalisierung - eine kulturhistorisch-ästhetische Analyse der Kunstbegriffe in der Bildenden Kunst in Berlin seit den 1990er Jahren bis heute" at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2018, she completed her dissertation at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts at the Institute of Theory. In 2020, this was published by b_books under the title "Das Temporäre politisch denken. Raumproduktion im Berlin der frühen 1990er" (Production of Space in Berlin in the Early 1990s). She is a member of the Berlin Council for the Arts since 2020 and on the advisory board of the Berlin Projektfond Urbane Praxis since 2022. Her main topics are cultural infrastructures, spatial strategies and collective practices.

Jeanette Pacher is a curator of contemporary art in Vienna. In addition to her work at the Secession (since 2007), she teaches at the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (since 2017). Previously, among other things, she was an editorial member of the radio art programme Kunstradio at Ö1. She writes texts and occasionally also translates into English (most recently Franz West's radio play text "Otium"). The exhibition as an artistic format and different spaces for the production and presentation of artistic works are among her main interests.
At the Secession she has realised exhibitions with Lara Almarcegui, Pawel Althamer, Nairy Baghramian, Rosa Barba, Cao Fei, Maria Hassabi, Klara Lidén, Renata Lucas, Cinthia Marcelle, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch, Danh Vo, and Klaus Weber, among others.

Architect, runs StudioVlayStreeruwitz together with Lina Streeruwitz. The focus of their work is the exploration of new approaches to urban planning and architectural tasks. Specific material and immaterial resources of a place are explored and assembled with discursive questions into a narrative of possibilities. Projects range from housing, cultural, and educational buildings to neighborhood developments and large-scale urban projects, such as the Freie Mitte Nordbahnhof/Vienna, which was exhibited at the 2022 Architecture Triennale in Oslo. Bernd Vlay also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and is a member of the scientific advisory board of Europan, which enables young architects to find new ways of implementing experimental ideas in European cities and territories. As a member of the design advisory board of the city of Innsbruck and the architectural advisory board of BIG, he is committed to the further development of (urban) building culture in Austria.