As part of INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL 2024, Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber developed four showcases with prepared and manipulated animals in cooperation with the Natural History Museum Vienna. One display case shows a halved deer, its torso cracked open, revealing a view into the universe with a floating cosmonaut. Another showcases a raven, its head replaced by a camera lens, sparking a myriad of associations, from the cameraequipped pigeons of the First World War, which actually served as scouting spies, to the recent parody of conspiracy theories «Birds Aren’t Real». In terms of content, the showcase group oscillates between Deleuze/Guattari’s «becoming-animal» and «becoming-landscape»¹ and Donna Haraway’s thesis that humans and animals influence each other in their encounters.² The Garden
of Earthly Delights is based on the conviction that the future is about «thinking of all living things and the planet as a system to be organised in
partnership»³.
Our relationship to and our interaction with nature are currently pressing international issues. Sending an appropriately charged object on tour has therefore sparked great interest in preliminary discussions. The Garden of Earthly Delights can be supplemented by lectures and incorporated into current discourses. Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber are also available for presentations and discussions.
The pergola-like installation Glitterhouse, which also houses the headquarters of INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL, acts as a kind of setting for the works.

Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber is an artists’ collective consisting of the sculptor Christoph Steinbrener, photographer and graphic designer Rainer Dempf, and architect Martin Huber. Their work in public spaces is repeatedly attracting a great deal of attention. In their works, Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber address the commercialization of urban space and the relationship between civilization and nature. In recent years, tourism’s devastation of cities and landscapes has repeatedly been the subject of projects and exhibitions. Following «Capricorn Two» at the Bismarck monument in Hamburg (2015), the equally questionable Siegestor in Munich was commented on in the fall of 2022 with the installation «Victory Spikes». Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber have also been running the Wandzeitung, an exhibition project in the public space, in the shop windows of their Gassenlokal studio in Vienna’s 2nd district for ten years.

¹ Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, 1987
² Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, 2007
³ Georg Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik, Suhrkamp, 1989

In cooperation with the Natural History Museum Vienna.

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