Group exhibition Against the Playbook

Basics

Description

Multi-Part Exhibition Project

In the group exhibition Against the Playbook, play and games are not an alternative to reality or a form of escapism, but rather a space for rehearsing and questioning. In play and games, social rules are not only made visible, but also negotiable.

The title refers to the playbook—the set of rules that defines strategies, roles, and scope for action in sports and politics alike. The exhibition challenges these predefined scripts. It asks who sets the rules, who benefits from them, and how they might be changed. In this way, play becomes an instrument of social critique and potential transformation.

In playful and politically charged works, the participating artists examine play as a social structure: as a system of role distribution, competition, cooperation, and exclusion. In doing so, it becomes clear that games not only reflect existing power relations, but often reproduce them as well—for example, in the form of economic disparities or normative body images. At the same time, they open up spaces in which alternative worlds can be imagined.

Rebelling against the playbook isn't just about breaking the rules, but shifting our perspective: moving away from the rigid competitive mindset that shapes so much of our social, political, and economic interactions, and toward collective action, solidarity, and new ways of imagining community. The status quo isn't just criticized, but playfully subverted.

The multi-part exhibition project is a collaboration between DAS WEISSE HAUS and philomena+. The artistic works are presented in both exhibition spaces in the form of installations, film works, performances, and participatory formats. They make references to board games such as chess, evoke memories of playing jumping rope in the courtyard, and transfer sporting competitions into new contexts. The show brings together new works by István Antal, Sedra Arab & Engy Mohsen, Verena Schneider & Sarah Sternat, and Kosta Tonev with existing or newly adapted works by Oscar Cueto, Anna Vasof, and Borjana Ventzislavova.

Childhood play serves as a point of departure for several positions in the exhibition. In Playgrounds of (Dis)Embodiment (2026), Verena Schneider and Sarah Sternat combine performance, dance, and installation into a choreographic landscape of resistant bodies. Drawing on the handling of doll-like figures – rearranging body parts like puzzle pieces – they create a space in which bodies are suspended, shifted, rearranged, or placed in relation to one another on the floor. Play becomes a way to experience different forms of being and new relationships to one’s own body – beyond normativity and rigid forms. In a performance at the opening, Verena Schneider activates the installation by reconstructing bodily norms and proposing queer reinterpretations of the body and its vulnerability.

Borjana Ventzislavova likewise draws on the motif of childhood and adolescent games, but in the tense context of political and economic reality. In her five-channel video installation Gesellschaftsspiele (2020), a group of adults dressed in business attire pass the time playing counting-out rhymes, ball games, and elastic jump rope. Against the backdrop of Sofia’s urban architecture, playful simulation overlaps with performed busyness. By having supposed decision-makers revert to childish role-playing, Borjana Ventzislavova shifts the perception of political seriousness.

The motif of shifting roles or functions reappears in Anna Vasof’s video work The Other Way Around (2024). While Borjana Ventzislavova has social actors swap roles, Anna Vasof reverses the logic of subject and object. In short filmic sequences, everyday objects are repurposed: fingers become chess pieces, a remote control “switches off” a person, fish catch a fishing rod. The familiar order of things is shaken. As in chess – a recurring reference system within the exhibition – it is not only the figure itself but the function attributed to it that determines its value and agency.

In How to Become a Villain in 10 Steps (2026), Kosta Tonev examines the figure of the villain, a role that is clearly coded in games, history, and pop culture. The villain threatens the status quo, transgresses rules, and acts as a projection surface for collective fears. Kosta Tonev combines a textile print with a multimedia wall installation. He makes references to history and pop culture and points to the etymological origin of the term: “Villain” derives from “villager”—referring to peasants or rural inhabitants—and was historically given a negative connotation through bourgeois class hierarchies. The villain thus appears less as a moral category than as a product of social devaluation—as a figure whose “guilt” lies in their position within a power structure.

This very question of value, hierarchy, and scope of action is taken up by István Antal in his work Pawn (2026). The chess pawn—seemingly of little value and yet strategically central—appears as a human-sized swaying punching bag in the exhibition space. Visitors are invited to physically interact with it. The “pawn” stands symbolically for those assigned a low rank within social structures, yet who form the foundation of the system. Despite limited means, it possesses, as in the game of chess, a degree of agency and the potential for transformation. The physical interaction between object and visitor becomes a metaphor for resilience, endurance, and social tension. The figure that rises again after each blow points to the often-overlooked power of the many – to collective movements, uprisings, and the persistent energy of the working class.

Oscar Cueto's interactive installation Service/Aufschlag (2018/2026) turns sport into a site of political tensions. By reinterpreting a tennis court, Cueto addresses competitive thinking as well as economic and social inequalities. The movement of the tennis serve is compared to that of demonstrators throwing Molotov cocktails. The tripartite division of the court disrupts the familiar duality of winners and losers, protesters and those in power. Visitors are invited to play, enter the court, and put on protest clothing—created in workshops with students from Mittelschule Leibnizgasse, BORG Henriettenplatz, and Hernalser Gymnasium Geblergasse. The sporting competition becomes a rehearsal of political agency.

References to protest culture and gestures of solidarity can also be found in the project Public Intimacy (2026) by Sedra Arab and Engy Mohsen. At DAS WEISSE HAUS, they present signs bearing fragments of Arabic protest chants. For example, one of them, translates as “down, down…” These fragments allow for different completions and can thus be situated within various struggles. Another textile work, in the form of a banner installed in the stairwell, features protest chants, combining two languages while nevertheless retaining its rhyme. They mobilize language to articulate political demands and experiment with wordplay and the possibilities of reading and translation. In the philomena+ project space, this exploration of solidarity and language continues in a text-based interactive installation.

Text: Aline Lenzhofer

*in collaboration with pupils of Mittelschule Leibnizgasse, BORG Henriettenplatz, and Hernalser Gymnasium Geblergasse and the artist Manuela Picallo Gil

Participants

Istvan Antal, Sedra Arab (gemeinsam mit Engy Mohsen), Oscar Cueto, Aline Lenzhofer (Kurator/in), Engy Mohsen (gemeinsam mit Sedra Arab), Verena Schneider (gemeinsam mit Sarah Sternat), Sarah Sternat (gemeinsam mit Verena Schneider), Kosta Tonev, Anna Vasof, Borjana Ventzislavova

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