Bodies Becoming Desire
As part of the Porn Film Festival Vienna, the Academy of Fine Kink will return to the Semperdepot in Vienna from April 14 to 20, 2026. The exhibition HARD FEELINGS brings together around 50 artistic works from various disciplines that explore bodies, sexuality, identity, and their ongoing transformation.
HARD FEELINGS understands desire not as something unambiguous, but as a contradictory, often intense process. Sex, emotion, and identity intertwine, collide, and constantly reshape themselves in the process. The exhibition creates a space in which these dynamics become visible and can be experienced.
Here, pornography is not understood as a mere image or taboo, but as a language, as the visual grammar of desire. It tells of how we touch, perceive, and imagine one another. At the same time, it lays bare our contradictions: the need for closeness and autonomy, the fear of visibility, and the longing to be seen.
At the center is the idea of transformation. Bodies and identities are not fixed states, but processes: they are performed, negotiated, and constantly reimagined. The works on display explore how intimacy (in the wake of societal shame) can be reimagined and which forms of sexuality and self-representation open up future spaces of possibility.
The exhibition views porn not as a problem, but as a source of potential – as an archive of emotions, a space where desire, vulnerability, and power come to light. Here, sexuality is not reduced to the act itself, but is presented as an experiment, a movement, and a constant reinvention of what it means to be human and to desire.
HARD FEELINGS invites us to embrace contradictions: between harshness and tenderness, between control and surrender, between who we are and who we could become.
Bodies and desire are political. Art is subversive. Transformation is possible.
SCHEDULE OPENING:
18:00 Open Doors
19:00 Opening Speech
Performance Day#1 – April 14
19:30-19:45 Nonhuman Gaze by Oleksii (Kolbei)
19:45-19:55 geboren um dich glücklich zu machen by Sarah Tasha
20:00-20:10 It Went Deeper Than You Thought by Mehrta Shirzadian
Performance Day#2 – April 17
17:30-17:50 HUMAN AFTER ALL by Catherine Spet & Milena Nowak
18:00-18:30 The Immediate Stages of the Erotic by SNEILA
Curated by:
Jasmin Hagendorfer, Viktoria Körbler, Yavuz Kurtulmus and Lars* Kollros, Kunst im Keller
Semperdepot
Lehárgasse 6/8, 1060 Wien, Austria