Book Launch: Debt

12.12.2025, 7:00 PM
BOOK LAUNCH DEBT

For the opening of the 2025/26 Annual Exhibition, we will present the catalogue reader of the 2024/25 Annual Exhibition, Debt, curated by Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas.

In the summer of 2024, we issued an open call for which Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas wrote a prompt inviting a brief response to the following question: “How does the meaning of debt—on a personal or societal level—relate to your work?” The call attracted a record number of applicants (almost three hundred), and the responses received—some extensive, in-depth, and deeply personal—collectively framed the context of this exhibition. This publication is both a document of the exhibition and an extension of its (spatial) narrative into the form(at) of a book.

To make a book about debt in times of debt is to take part in a fragile economy of care. It means insisting that thought, like art, still matters, even when everything around us suggests austerity, delay, and scarcity. It asks how debt can be read, not only as an economic or political condition but as an emotional, symbolic, and even psychoanalytic relation.

With texts and essays by Mirela Baciak, Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas, Benjamin Hirte, Miriam Stoney, Frank Wasser, and Alenka Zupančič.

Published by DISTANZ Verlag and Salzburger Kunstverein.