PART - International Art Residency Austria Presents still (a little life) at The Hall Vienna

A single word can hold contradictions without resolving them. "Still", as Stille (silence), as stillstehen (to pause), as noch (something that persists), as the film still that isolates a single frame from the stream of images, as the Stillleben where ordinary objects gather quiet weight, moves through each of its meanings without choosing one.

The question the word carries is not rhetorical: why does life matter precisely when it has briefly stopped?

There are at least two kinds of suspension. The kind that slows perception down gently, softening light, holding a face mid-expression. And the kind that holds the body inside a system it didn't design, clinical, precise, mediated by apparatus rather than touch. Both are things life does to us. The exhibition makes room for both simultaneously.

The word "still" carries silence, persistence, and the isolated film frame all at once, and refuses to settle into any one of them. This is where the exhibition begins.

The Hall at PART International Art Residency Austria is a former World's Fair pavilion built in 1873, recently refurbished with a pale wood-panelled skylight ceiling and floor-to-ceiling white linen curtains enclosing every wall.

The light inside is diffuse and directionless, arriving without visible source. It is a space that already slows things down before any work is installed, the kind of room where time seems not to stop but to thicken.

Curator Barbara Horvath's decision to bring these three practices together here seems inseparable from what the building already does to attention.

Neven Allgeier's photographs occupy the centre of the space on a freestanding aluminium grid structure. A series of large-format prints shows faces, figures at the edge of golden hour, a flower close-up, a silhouette against pale winter light. The images carry the quality the exhibition's title invokes: moments extracted from sequence, made precise by isolation.

Light in Allgeier's work seems to arrive just before it fades. Faces appear mid-expression, not quite arrived at whatever they were becoming.

The grid structure itself, industrial, open, holds these tender photographs without enclosing them, leaving them visible from multiple angles as one moves through the room.

Judith Eisler works from film stills, painting them in oils that preserve the original blur and grain. A small canvas shows what appears to be a figure in a striped interior, caught at the exact moment the camera shifts, not motion, but its residue.

Another work closes in on a dark organic surface, spiny and dense, something between flower and specimen, rendered with the same cool care one brings to evidence. Eisler's paintings seem less interested in what the frozen frame shows than in the trembling it contains.

Pakui Hardware's The Host (2021–2025) occupies the rear of the space with a different register of stillness. Three table-like forms stand on pointed steel legs, each draped in translucent material, one flesh-toned and pale, one darker charcoal mesh, with small red organic shapes resting on the surfaces. Above each, a jointed mechanical arm holds an amber-orange translucent disc, tilted at an angle that suggests examination.

The installation reads as an operating theatre drained of urgency: bodies prepared, held in readiness, care administered by apparatus rather than presence. The large amber discs catch the hall's even light and warm it, slightly. They do not explain themselves.

The three positions don't reconcile with each other, and that friction holds the exhibition together. Allgeier's warmth and Pakui Hardware's clinical precision occupy the same room because the same word applies to both: the tender suspension of a portrait held in light, and the suspended body within a system of precision and control.

That these are not opposites, that both might be forms of attention, or its failure, is something the present moment seems to require looking at directly.

What lingers is less a conclusion than a question about care: what it looks like when attention is genuine, and what it looks like when it is only technologically exact.

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Pakui Hardware on Instagram

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Barbara Horvath on Instagram

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