11 – 25 November 2025

Artist: Žarko Aleksić / Laurus Edelbacher / Azalea Ortega Flores

Curator: Deniz Güvensoy

Fabrikraum Kunstverein, Vienna

host_age:// is a play on words that explores the dynamics between “host” and “hostage,” two intertwined concepts that define contemporary political space. It’s a curatorial research project that examines how security and control have come to replace free will, privacy, agency, and democracy.

Today’s political and spatial order operates on two levels — digital and territorial. The host may be a platform, a state, or a citizen; the hostage, an online user, immigrant, or resident. The exhibition questions how hosts and guests become trapped in a vicious circle, slowly transforming into hostages — the symbolic figure of our era — by drawing on the concept of hospitality, which constructs political space while carrying hostility at its core.

The agency of the subject is challenged in the post-control society, where individuals are constrained not only by territorial borders but also by so-called “personal choices.” We allow corporations to access our private data, enabling them to analyze, predict, and influence our behaviors and reactions. Conventional media continues to manufacture the consent of the masses, while increasing authoritarianism, populism, and performativity in politics have become defining features of our time. We are trapped in a political and economic system that profits from war, exploits the labor of the working class and migrants, violates privacy, and manipulates emotions.

The reference to programming language in the title points to the digital systems that hold us ‘hostage’ through data extraction and algorithmic governance. Subjects are not only controlled by enclosure, but also by surveillance technologies that track our emotions, movements, ideas, political opinions, and consumption habits, which define who we are.

Featuring works by Žarko Aleksić, Laurus Edelbacher, and Azalea Ortega Flores, the exhibition explores the relationship between media manipulation, affective capitalism, and border and surveillance technologies through neuroscience, emotion-driven systems, and immersive 3D environments.