Body Talk

About the exhibition

The artist Nives Widauer lives and works in Vienna. In her works—which encompass photography, video, installation, and stage design—she explores the relationships between the body, nature, and cultural imagery. For the exhibition Body Talk, Widauer, together with Paris-based critic J. Emil Sennewald, places her series Body Talk | Paracelsus in dialogue with objects from the Josephinum’s collection. The starting point is the human body as an interconnected system in which physical, emotional, and cultural aspects interact inseparably. Inspired by the ideas of Paracelsus, the exhibition connects contemporary art with the history of science and medicine. Historical exhibits and current works open up new perspectives on representations of the body, anatomy, and health, and invite visitors to reflect on the cultural shaping of our body consciousness.

Nives Widauer

Nives Widauer was born in Basel, Switzerland, and now lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel, where she earned her degree in the Audiovisual Design program. After completing her studies, Widauer began to focus intensively on video art and multimedia projects. Since the late 1980s, she has also been active in the fields of theater and opera, where she has developed video projections and stage designs, among other things. In her artworks, Widauer combines different media and is particularly interested in the connection between the analog and the digital, as well as between the past and the present. In doing so, she also uses found objects, historical materials, photographs, and texts, placing them in new contexts.

Nives Widauer’s works have been exhibited at venues including the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden (2026), the Lentos Art Museum in Linz (2025), the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (2023), the Kunstmuseum Basel (2022), the Kunsthaus Zürich (2022), the Austrian Cultural Forum in Washington (2020), the Jewish Museum Vienna (2020), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2019), the Centre Cultural Suisse in Paris (2019), the Belvedere Museum in Vienna (2016/2018), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (2015).