The year 2019 is all about change. This year's Vienna Biennale even carries the word it in its name and shows how art, design and architecture can change the world.

The festival challenges us to help shape our digital world and lets us take a peek into the future with a total of nine exhibitions and an overarching conference. 
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Director General of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art and initiator of the Vienna Biennale, describes the times we live in as the "birth of a new Modernism". It takes courageous visions to deal with artificial intelligence, as well as for the deployment of new technologies and for new forms of coexistence, says the Biennale director.

Artificial intelligence often comes up against a lack of understanding or even rejection. Another reason, therefore, to focus on it and show what it's all about. At the exhibition Uncanny Values at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, we are brought closer to the potential of artificial intelligence, especially in connection with the associated technologies. A multimedia show that seeks dialog with the visitors with 18 international artists and designers. With its exhibition project Climate change! From consumption to the sustainable quality society, the Viennese design duo EOOS provides another way of looking at how transformational design can positively counteract climate change.

We are offered these from the end of May by the Kunsthalle Wien, where the exhibition Hysterical Miningfocuses on the concept and impact of technology in the context of gender roles. Why is technology generally still coded by men, and how can we learn from or break out of this reality? The exhibition investigates the material worlds we create through technologies and attempts to give answers to the role of technology in the formation of local and global configurations of power, forms of identity, and lifestyles.

The artists' collective Time's Up of the Applied Innovation Laboratory of the University of Applied Arts Vienna agrees with this. In their project Change Was Our Only Chance, they design a future scenario that is deliberately completely removed from the typical, apocalyptic image of catastrophe. It is about experiencing the world in 2047 from an optimistic-realistic perspective in order to ultimately "show that art can intervene in social developments and help shape them", according to Gerald Bast, rector of the University of Applied Art.

Vienna Biennale for Change 2019, May 29 - October 6, 2019
All events, dates, and further information on the festival are available at  www.viennabiennale.org