HARD FEELINGS – Bodies Becoming Desire
Organized by Kunst im Keller Wien
Venue: Semperdepot, Vienna
Exhibition dates: April 14–20, 2026
Setup: April 12-13, 12am – 8pm
Dismantling: April 21, 10am – 8pm
Deadline for submissions: January 10, 2025, 23:59 CET
In cooperation with Porn Film Festival Vienna
*Easy English Version below
EASY ENGLISH VERSION
HARD FEELINGS – Bodies Becoming Desire
The Academy of Fine Kink, organized by Kunst im Keller Vienna and the Porn Film Festival Vienna (PFFV), returns to the Semperdepot Vienna in 2026 for its fourth edition.
The exhibition “HARD FEELINGS – Bodies Becoming Desire” presents art from different disciplines. All works explore sexuality, the body, emotions, and transformation.
Desire is not simple. It can be loud or quiet, gentle or painful, but it always changes us. The exhibition looks at how sex, identity, and emotion connect and shape each other.
Pornography is not just an image or a taboo, it is a language of desire. It tells stories about how we touch, see, and imagine one another. It can show limits and open new paths.
The artists explore how identity, desire, and the body are always in motion.
How do our bodies remember and unlearn?
How can sexuality lead to freedom?
What could the future of sex and intimacy look like?
Through installations, performances, films, photos, and sculptures, Hard Feelings shows that porn is not the problem, it is a possibility. Porn can help us understand ourselves, change, and reinvent who we are.This exhibition celebrates contradictions: strength and softness, fear and lust, pain and liberation.
Bodies and desire are political, art is subversive, and transformation is possible.
The association Kunst im Keller Wien invites artists from all disciplines to submit works for the next edition of the exhibition, this time under the title “HARD FEELINGS – Bodies Becoming Desire.”
The exhibition will take place at the Semperdepot Vienna in cooperation with Porn Film Festival Vienna.We are looking for artistic positions that explore bodies, identities, sexuality, and transformation, sensual, critical, and courageous.
Sex-positive, but not sexist. Porn-positive, but not conservative mainstream. Body-positive, but never harmful.
Desire is messy. It’s sticky, loud, tender, sometimes cruel — and always transformative.
Hard Feelings is an exhibition about the ways sexuality, identity, and emotion intersect, collide, and reshape each other. It celebrates the raw intensity of sex and porn as spaces where we can confront ourselves — where power, pleasure, and vulnerability meet, clash, and morph into something new.
Pornography, in its many forms, is more than a spectacle. It is a language — a visual grammar of desire that speaks about how we touch, consume, and imagine each other. It mirrors our contradictions: the longing to connect and the need to remain autonomous, the fear of exposure and the ecstasy of being seen. Within these hard feelings lies the soft core of transformation.
The exhibition invites artists to explore how identity and sexuality are never stable but constantly performed and redefined.
How do our bodies remember and unlearn?
How do we rebuild intimacy after societal shame?
How do we turn the personal into the political — and the sexual into a site of liberation?
How do we build our futures of sex?
Through installations, performances, films, photographs, and sculptural works, Hard Feelings unfolds a landscape of becoming. It asks how pornography, sensuality, and self-representation can open portals to self-invention — to new bodies, new roles, and new forms of desire.
In this space, porn is not the problem but the possibility. It becomes an archive of feeling, an emotional choreography that reveals how we navigate lust, fear, and longing. Here, sexuality is not reduced to the act itself — it’s a process, an experiment, a continuous reprogramming of what it means to be human, erotic, and alive.
Hard Feelings – Bodies Becoming Desire is not afraid of contradictions. It celebrates them. It wants to make room for intensity, for tenderness, for the friction between who we are and who we might become. Bodies break and reassemble. Desire creates and destroys. In this flux, identity is not found — it is made, unmade, and made again.
Bodies and desire are political, art is subversive, and transformation is possible.
Conditions for participation:
- Tools and materials can only be provided to a limited extent.
- Assistance with installation is only partially available.
- Works coming from other provinces or abroad can be installed by our team upon prior arrangement.
- The funding situation is currently uncertain, so transportation costs may not be covered.
- If you require technical equipment (monitor, projector, speakers), please indicate this – only limited resources are available.
- No material costs or artist fees can be paid – unfortunately, there is no budget 🙁
- Participation is open to everyone, regardless of origin, gender, or sexual identity.
Submission:
Please send a PDF (max. 5 MB) including the following information:
- A short text about the work (approx. ½ A4 page)
- Details on medium, format, and duration of the work
- One image of the work or sketches (for performances)
- Estimated shipping costs (if applicable – we will try to support this)
- File name: Lastname_Kink.pdf
- In a second PDF (max. 10 MB), please include: CV and portfolio
Additionally, please provide one image of your work and one of yourself – this will help us with coordination if your work is selected. These images can be updated later if needed.
Contact: info@kunst-im-keller.at or art@pffv.at
Curated by: Jasmin Hagendorfer, Lars* Kollros, Viktoria Körbler und Yavuz Kurtulmus