> � contact: seth.weiner@yahoo.com
BIo
buttoned up, copy-paste friendly
*
Artist Talk
if you have the time...
2023
Short PFO
email practical portfolio (PDF)
*2025
cv
fully business-like (PDF)
*2026

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*Long (4,254 characters including spaces) - 10 2026
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Often containing performance and proposal simultaneously, Seth Weiner’s work employs a wide range of media in which he explores the gaps between architectural fiction and social convention to create both actual and imagined spatial environments.

Moving across scales, from the intimacy of a page or a song to the façade of a building and its surrounding context, Weiner likes to think his work is about the joy of finding and losing space. Many of his exhibitions have included something visitors can take away, and his websites and albums are free online. Coming from architecture, he thinks of these things as made to be lived with and handled, not only looked at from a distance.

In 2008 Weiner began the music project Sadie Siegel, using his great-grandmother’s name to collaborate with himself and explore sound as an extension of touch, an expression of space, and a way to create impossible places. Some of those places are built for a particular site and the life around it, others carried on an album as mobile architecture.

Weiner has been part of collectives from the start, co-founding Untitled Collective in Los Angeles (2010–2012), joining Gruppe Uno Wien, and serving from 2012 to 2018 as Co-Artistic Director of Berlin-based Care Of Editions, a conceptual business model in the form of a record label. Today he sits on the board of kuntsverein, the Vienna collective for queer and post*migrant art and culture behind the space 8B®1. Since 2012 he has also made spatial concepts for exhibitions with curators, artists, and institutions. These infrastructural pieces extend collaboration beyond the single object and use the context as material. His writing, mostly personal essays and texts, includes some that are spatial concepts in their own right and some written for other artists’ exhibitions.

From 2018 to 2025 Weiner was the Artistic Director of Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, a nonprofit museum-like entity that serves as a mobile place of remembrance and projection for what was lost during National Socialism. Since 2025 he has been its Collection Custodian. As director, he focused on commissioning artworks that deal with the history of Atelier Bachwitz, a publishing house located in the building where the Palais began in 1908, until the firm was Aryanized. For Weiner, who is Jewish, work on the Palais is an ongoing act of reclamation and a way to explore what that identity means in contemporary Austria. While the state protects the building as a monument, the Palais understands it as a memorial.

Since 2011 Weiner has taught across art, architecture, and design, to artists and non-artists alike. At Central European University he has been a visiting faculty member in the Culture, Politics, and Society program since 2023, teaching Principles of Visual Design and Sound & Vision. At Webster Vienna Private University he has taught since 2014, in courses such as Design Concepts: Art & Politics and the first-year seminar You Don’t Get to Say I’m Bored: Reading the Everyday. At the University of Art and Design Linz (2018–2024), in the Department of Space & Design Strategies, he taught Crit Class, Space is a Doubt, and Hideaways, Giveaways: Site, Scale & Context, among others. He has also taught in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, at the Institute for Art and Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at UdK Berlin, and at the Art Institute of California–Hollywood.

Weiner studied drawing and painting at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005), sound at the Center for the Creation of Music Iannis Xenakis in Paris (2006), and architecture at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles (2010). In 2023 he was a Walker Cultural Leader in Arts and Culture at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts at Brock University in Canada. That year he also received the Teacher of the Year Award from the Student Government Association at Webster Vienna Private University. In 2020 he received an Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Arts (Staatsstipendium für Bildende Kunst). His work is held in the paper collection of the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (MAK), the MUSA Art Collection of the City of Vienna (an offline copy of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien), and private collections.

He has given talks, workshops, and guest lectures on the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2024, 2026) and Webster University St. Louis (2019), on independent spaces at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz (2025), on space, occupation, and remembrance in the digital sphere at the Goethe-Institut in Lisbon (2025), on sound and public space at the CIEE Global Institute in Berlin (2023), and on extended bodies and spaces at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga (2022).

Weiner has exhibited at the MAK, Wien Museum MUSA, Tuesday@Secession, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, and Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna, Festival der Regionen in Upper Austria, the Vorarlberg Museum and Künstlerhaus Bregenz, the Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival and the MAK Center in Los Angeles, Villa Elisabeth in Berlin, Demon’s Mouth in Oslo, LTMKS Project Space in Vilnius, and The Luminary in St. Louis, among others.

Links:
sethweiner.org
palaisdesbeauxarts.at
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A close up portrait of a dude in a basment.

*2015 - Somehow I feel more conservative than I used to because my works are no longer impossible. I’ve been building things. I’ve been interested in craft and color, the subject of perception in drawing and painting and the shapelessness of musical figures. But maybe on the other end of this insecurity is an awareness that the multiple sites of a project don’t necessarily have to be congruent. They can each be dealt with on their own terms, and their terms continually shift: there’s the direct experience of a work, its elastic representation, and the conversations that attempt to access the experience when its fact is at a distance from the senses.

For a few years I was utterly confused about how my work fit within a gallery setting. It’s not that my works were too ephemeral, large or rejected rarefication necessarily; it’s that I hadn’t been viewing the setting as a multitude of relationships to operate within and in-between. My recent work though has for the most part been built from this dynamic, responding to the contextual parameters of both physical as well as conceptual sites.

I often spend a fair amount of time planning and discussing with the curator of a show how the choreography and pacing of attention interacts with meaning, and then develop my work based on the overall exhibition context. My process has been twofold: approaching a project as multiple sites while continuing to research and experiment with the ways in which space itself formats the social.

Most of my recent work has involved sculptural elements that have a basis in the semantics of architecture: windows, walls, ceilings, doors, stairs, floors, etc.  Like these architectural building blocks, it’s primarily through the body that meaning is activated. A window is something to look out of or into; to be looked at through. Railings demarcate territory and can be leaned on. Walls partition and hold the space in-between material, regardless of if they are made from vocal bodies, thread or wood. A door creates and blocks passage from one condition to another. The floor is an inevitable point of bodily contact, its performance is relentless.

With all of these elements an institutionalized body becomes a ready-made. And while the body, an institution in itself, may reinforce predictable patterns of learned behavior, my aim is to create works which not only reflect upon these constructions but project possibilities.

(a little stiff but just so I don't forget some of the sentences/catch phrases...)

Space is a doubt that we are constantly attempting to mark. It slips away with time, melting through our fingers just as we find a name for it. We color it, describe it with lines, trade it as data. We borrow it, pollute it, speculate upon its futures. We designate it as territory by planting ourselves in it, inscribing it with intention.