For Marleen Leitner and Michael Schitnig utopia is an opportunity and a tool in equal measure. Which is why they have chosen Thomas More’s “Utopia”, which was published in 1516 and shaped our ideas of ideal societies in the near and distant future, as the starting point for their work for the smallest gallery – collaboration space.

Leitner and Schitnig, aka studio Asynchrome, have been exploring spatial and societal structures since 2013. Working at the interface between art and architecture, the two artists see drawing as a hermeneutic epistemological method for assimilating and interpreting process-based developments and complex facts. The comic medium allows them to highlight spaces of opportunity within architecture and the visual arts by means of narration, facilitating an experimental experience of these spaces. In 2015 the Austrian artist duo contributed to “Randnotizen” of steirischer herbst.

This year, in keeping with the motto “utopia is dead, long live utopia”, studio Asynchrome sets out on a multimodal search for traces, designing a new piece for the smallest gallery which will take up the entire exhibition space – 256 x 174 x 45 cm. Based on the English scholar’s philosophical text, they confront utopian thinking of the past with its present-day potential, inspiring us to reflect on the future of the present. What is going to happen next? And how to trace this path seismographically, as indeterminate as it may be?

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