Exhibition Opening
November 20th, 2025, 7 pm
In her works, Schmid loves to play with time: Temporality as a theme is reflected in different forms throughout her series of works. She is particularly interested in perception and influencing viewers’ everyday ways of seeing and creating something that goes beyond human perception. Her work focuses on historical image-making processes, the potential for representing landscape, and the historical development of cinema. She describes her practice as “going back to the past to rethink the present”: by exploring the fundamental conditions of capturing and projecting (moving) images, she places the medium itself at the center of her inquiry, allowing its full potential to unfold.
„We no longer notice what is extraordinary in daily life. The artist Viktoria Schmid, however, takes this as her material. Schmid manages to draw out the fascinating potential in the interweaving of light and time. She makes traces of light visible and turns them into the central focus of how she deals with time and space. While we generally only pay secondary attention to the play of shadow and light, she manages to draw attention back to these phenomena and she does so with impressive reduction.“ (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
Viktoria Schmid is a visual artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of cinema and exhibition space. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally at exhibitions and film festivals, including Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Kunsthaus Graz, Toronto International Film Festival, Viennale Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and FID Marseille, among others. Schmid has a background in music: starting at an early age as a DJ and later as a drummer. She studied filmmaking at the Friedl Kubelka School, holds a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Vienna, and completed a Master’s degree in Time-Based Media at the University of Art and Design Linz in 2014. She has been recognized with several awards, including the Achievement Award for Visual Art in Lower Austria (2019), the Austrian State Stipend for Photography (2022), and the Austrian Short Film Award at Vienna Shorts (2023). She was an artist in residence at Nida Art Colony (Lithuania) in 2019, ISCP (New York City) in 2020/2022 and at the Cité des Artes (Paris) in 2025.
Picture: Detail of „For Madelon Vriesendorp“, Series of four cyanotypes on paper, each 28 x 36 cm, 2023