The Viennese project art centre Open Space (http://openspace-zkp.org) created a profile for itself within a few years by showing the kind of art that is best described as “in between.” On the one hand, this was a conscious, strategic choice designed to make the most of the gulf that separates the mainstream from the alternative art scene, the center (Austria, Western Europe, North America) from the periphery (Eastern Europe). On the other hand, it could be seen as a strategy for visibility and survival in an intensely commodified culture.

The interval, more than just an empty, liminal space, allows for a gooey, messy mélange of works that are at once sensuous, affective, and intimate, while pointing to the harsh realities of a world plagued by hope at the same time as despair. The artists featured in this exhibition are also stuck in an interval: they are old enough to have come of age during Communist Romania, but also young enough to experience the aftereffects of the country’s rupture with the past and the transition to its democratic present.

Daughters of Turan is an exhibition of recent video and photographic work by Almagul Menlibayeva that introduces the viewer to the history and culture of the artist’s native Kazakhstan. Menlibayeva has cited video and performance artist Nezaket Ekici from Turkey as her one of the artists who have influenced her. Like Ekici Menlibayeva shows old rituals in contemporary interpretations. Instead of subverting tradition, Menlibayeva aims to demonstrate that the traditional and the modern (such as popular culture) can mutually enrich each other.