groupshow emerged in 2007 as an open laboratory at Tanzquartier Wien in the Museumsquartier and was conceived as a first shared working phase of a temporary constellation of artists from contemporary dance, performance, and visual art. The format was not oriented toward a conventional presentation, but toward an intensive process of research, experimentation, and negotiation of artistic strategies within a group.

The participants included Catrin Bolt, Alice Chauchat, Frédéric Gies, Anne Juren, Sonia Leimer, Christian Mayer, Yves Mettler, Roland Seidel, Mårten Spångberg, and Alexander Wolff. Many of them had collaborated in different constellations before, allowing groupshow to be understood both as a continuation of existing dialogues and as an opening toward new collective dynamics.

The title groupshow functioned as a programmatic proposition. It points to a productive tension between two artistic logics. On the one hand, the group work in dance, often developed from a central choreographic perspective and shaped into a coherent piece. On the other hand, the group exhibition in visual art, where autonomous positions coexist and are brought into relation through curatorial decisions.

At the core of the laboratory was the question of how these two models might be shifted into one another. How can a shared working process emerge without dissolving individual authorship. How can difference remain visible while also acting as a driving force for collective form making. Influence, friction, and response were deliberately activated as productive forces.

groupshow thus explored fundamental conditions of artistic practice within the field between choreography, performance, and installation. The work moved between body, object, and space, opening a conceptual terrain in which dance and visual art do not stand in opposition but permeate one another.