4 Dec 2025 – 7 Feb 2026
KOENIG2 by_robbygreif

 

Heti PRACK’s work chooses its aesthetic basis in the architectural elements of the Viennese palaces of the workers’ movement. The rejection of the facade architecture of the Gründerzeit, and the expression of progressive practicality and functionality characterise its appearance. PRACK’s approach leads him past the methods of production and materiality to the backgrounds and determining factors of everyday life – to queer passions and limitations. The promises of the republican modernity of Red Vienna allowed hope to grow for a fulfilled life and for needs that would be gratified, and to that end offered an apparently rational order, that at the same time led to constriction for those who did not fit into the, in part rigid, social grid. The grid, as quite simply the ornament of the working class, is a structure that simultaneously promised novelty and a new start, as it stood for constriction and repetition.

The installation “Honorary Appointment” deals, from a queer perspective, with questions of honour and dignity, with the subversion of oppressive moral values and the self-assured reference to a queer way of life, that also wishes to include the sluttiness of anonymous sex. The sculpture “Schalter Eins” (“Counter One”) refers to the official order of a (not only historical) life that is constantly and repeatedly controlled and regulated, even in its most private moments, and that is, where applicable, also afflicted by eradication. The gap in the counter, intended for communication with the official institutions, here also invokes the glory hole, as a hatch for lust and physical communication, whose actions oscillate between utter abandon and absolute anonymity; where the anonymity can equally be associated with increase in pleasure, precisely for queer persons at various points in time, as it can with the enforced disappearance from a persecuting and destructive social power.

The counter wall with its speaking hole, however, not only doubles as a toilet stall with a glory hole, but also admits associations with the winged altarpiece and with the confessional booth. In that place as well, the spatial setting of a somewhat porous partition wall creates the conditions for a (partially) anonymous interpersonal transaction which ultimately has to do with the granting of relief. “Honorary Appointment” reveals an abstracted setting within which human existence and queer corporeality meet up with the attempt on the part of the authorities to control and obliterate these aspects. Its controversy, however, does not end with the basic conditions: the three reliefs (“Beamtloch” [“Officer’s Hole”], “Primitive Technologie” [“Primitive Technology”] and “Ich wurde geschaffen dich zu lieben” [“I was made for loving you”] narrate scenes of direct, queer corporeality and queer life. The closely situated image details of the scenes depicted here also refer to contemporary queer lifestyle, which is proportionately displaced into the algorithm-influenced digital space. One of the scenes (“Primitive Technology”) is at the same time an immediate historical account of the “investigative work” of a Nazi police officer who convicted numerous homosexual men in public toilets and baths by blending in with them during cruising. Heti PRACK’s works are not limited to a historical dimension, but also refer to an immediate contemporary period, in which minorities and marginalised groups see themselves exposed to increasing social and political pressure. The severity and coldness of the installation, however, exists at the same time with a queer self-understanding that considers itself as a wedge that keeps rigid social systems open and which has arrived in order to stay. 

(Text: Niko Wahl, 2025)

Primitive Technologie
2025
plaster, bone glue
48 x 27 x 10 cm

Beamtloch
2025
plaster, bone glue
48 x 27 x 10 cm

Ich bin dazu geschaffen, dich zu lieben
2025
plaster, bone glue
48 x 27 x 7 cm

M.
2025
styrofoam, plaster, bone glue, pigments
40.4 x 12.5 x 9 cm

Schalter Eins
2025
mixed media
180 x 120 x 51 cm

A.
2025
styrofoam, plaster, bone glue, pigments
39.2 x 14.4 x 8.2 cm