Mai Ling Festival Spring Stretch
Duration: 12 May – 31 May, 2026
Location: 8B®1, Weiglgasse 8/B1/R1 – 1150 Vienna @kuntsverein
Opening: 12 May 19:00
Exhibition: 16 – 31 May (Thursday – Saturday, 3 – 7 pm)
*The exhibition is closed on 14 and 15 May.
For Mai Ling’s third and final program in the series Becoming Stickiness: Protocols for Survival, the festival Spring Stretch dives into spring and its transformative and regenerative energy through an exhibition and a series of workshops, performances, talks, reading sessions, interventions, and gatherings. Extending Mai Ling’s rhizomatic relations of friendships, kinships, and alliances, it honours plural relations and practices of collective resilience and survival.
The programme brings together works and practices that reflect on the complexities of language, memory, labor, and belongings that have been shaped by diasporic, migratory lived experiences and various means of knowledge transfer. Some works engage with traditional and indigenous techniques as well as mythology as a medium for storytelling, sharing, and dreaming. Others invite us to listen gently to the surrounding landscapes that nurture multispecies entanglement, collectively imagining agroecological futures. Further, the festival explores dispersed histories of displacement, marginalized ghostly matters, as well as in-between states of life and death, while attending to fragility, resilience, and transformation. It also touches upon representations of gendered and colonial violence, while calling for a collective effort to resist and stick together.
Spring Stretch is accompanied by Mai Ling’s ever-transforming mobile kitchen, which acts as a platform for gatherings, imagining communal cooking, collective public eating, and cultural memories around them.
Over the course of three weeks of May at 8B®1 in the 15th district, we will be learning from and with artists, researchers, practitioners, makers, writers, and community members whose practices embody and enact sprouting, rooting, and futuring, across generations and geographies.
With: Leonardiansyah Allenda, Ivanka Custodio and Judy Fugoso, Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders, Tang Han, Marcos Kueh, Jessica J. Lee, Yen Noh, So Young Park, Ziliä Qansurá, SAE Greenhouse, Shireen Seno, He Shen and Chanyoung Park, and Tofu Stand
Detailed program to come.