Foto Arsenal Wien
#2 min Peter Watkins
9. 3. 2026
Opened in March 2025, Foto Arsenal Wien (FAW) is Austria’s shiny new national centre for photography and lens-based media. Conceived as a dedicated platform for contemporary photographic practice in the expanded field, FAW situates itself as a medium-specific institutional space, presenting historically informed perspectives, an expansive international outlook, with a prerequisite emphasis on education and inclusivity.
Through its exhibitions and public programmes, it has quickly established a clear role within Vienna’s already burgeoning cultural infrastructure. Its influence extends through ambitious collaborative activities such as FOTO WIEN festival, a longstanding biennial that FAW have been running since 2023, and Festival Vienna Digital Cultures – a platform co-run alongside Kunsthalle Wien dedicated to examining the forms of influence within digital image cultures.
Situated just outside Vienna’s central district, Foto Arsenal Wien, as its name suggests, occupies part of the historic Arsenal complex, adjacent to the Museum of Military History, in green, unexpectedly peaceful surroundings. Its location encourages purposeful visits, inviting audiences to engage with its approximately 1,000 m2 of exhibition space. It’s conceived as a central platform for exhibition, research, and discourse that treats photography not as a subsidiary medium, but as a critical and autonomous field within contemporary art. At the helm is Felix Hoffmann, the German cultural scholar and curator. Prior to his role at FAW, Hoffmann was Head of Programmes and chief curator at C/O Berlin from 2005 to 2022, where he shaped exhibitions, public programmes, and institutional strategy. During his time at C/O, he curated numerous international solo exhibitions, including shows on Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Lindbergh, and Gordon Parks. It’s this experience that he is now transplanting into Vienna's cultural landscape, with an ambitious vision for photography’s position within the city. He takes up the role of Artistic Director, with curators Mona Schubert and Marit Lena Herrmann as lead curators.
One of their major forthcoming exhibitions is a retrospective of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, presenting over 200 works, 250 publication reproductions, rare books, and audiovisual projections, giving an unprecedented insight into the artist's life and work. Organised by the Instituto Moreira Salles (Brazil) in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation (Japan) and curated by Thyago Nogueira (IMS) with Marit Lena Herrmann (Foto Arsenal Wien), the exhibition situates Moriyama’s work in conversation with present-day issues of media manipulations, state surveillance, and image fetishism – this should be well worth a visit.
Text | Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins
#1 min Markéta Kinterová
Jan-Henry Engström – Dimma Brume Mist
#1 min Tereza Jobová
Tereza Jobová
#2 min Luboš Svoboda
Barbora Nemčeková
#1 min Sasha Kurmaz, Michał Sita
Sasha Kurmaz – Codes of Violence: Visual Diary
Artistic diary by Sasha Kurmaz, developed since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has just been published in the book form. The project consists of an ever-expanding set of approximately 500 collages, juxtaposing fragments of photographs, drawings, and images—visual material drawn from public space under the conditions of a war unfolding all around.
#3 min Barbora Vanická Čápová
Authenticity
We all want to be authentic. We yearn for authentic relationships and experiences. We share such moments and seek information we can trust. Yet the more we try to grasp hold of authenticity, the more it slips through our fingers. At its heart is a tension constantly renegotiated in response to our personal, societal, and technological evolution.
#2 min Josef Moucha
Negatives from the Trash 1900–1945
#1 min Peter Watkins, Eugenie Shinkle
Peter Watkins – Mother Tongue
‘Wann kommt der Morgen?' The sentiment in this short phrase can’t readily be translated into English. In the original German, it carries a weight of melancholy that is lost when it’s transposed into another language. Peter Watkins’ mother left behind many such reflections, written on scraps of paper or carefully set down in notebooks.
#2 min Tereza Zelenková, Peter Watkins