Birke Gorm

tales from the attic
Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art

Found in an Attic

Birke Gorm (b. Hamburg, 1986; lives and works in Vienna) examines the information that materials carry and their immediate impact on society. Connecting them to traditional craft practices and gendered forms of labor, she explores questions of work, self-optimization, and equality.

For the Austrian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale, Gorm transforms the upper floor of the Eunam Museum of Art into an attic: a storage place, full of latent energies, largely left undisturbed. In such spaces, things appear static or fixed, yet reveal a life of their own when unobserved. An attic can also be read as the house’s mind, mirroring its residents’ emotional states; symbolizing stored, repressed memories, unprocessed emotions, and the societal forces that shape identity.

Conceived as an object that could be found in an attic, a collection of images, concepts, and ideas revolving around the work of Birke Gorm, tales from the attic includes new contributions by Attilia Fattori Franchini, Estelle Hoy, Laura McLean-Ferris, Robert Müller, and the artist, along with a selection of fictional, experimental, and poetic text excerpts. The publication accompanies the Austrian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, expanding the exhibition’s founding concepts across criticality and fiction.