WIENSPRING 2025

title: WIENSPRING – POPPIES EDITION
( PERFORMANCE, HAPPINENT )

Saturday, May 3, 2025 Vienna, Austria

Start: Wiedner Werkstätte 1 pm
Duration: 3.15 h

Disguised as a “spring meadow with allotment plot”, Kim Okura distributed 1.111 symbols of elevating memories to people she met during her stroll through Vienna.

ARTIST NOTE:

Start approx. 1 p.m.

Starting and ending point is the Wiedner Werkstätte,
at level of Wiedner Hauptstraße 152, 1050 Vienna

Performance-Tour 2024:

Wiedner Hauptstraße
Karlsplatz
Kärntner Straße
Stock-im-Eisen-Platz
Stephansplatz

Return route:
Graben
Seiler- oder Spiegelgasse
Albertina
Opernring
Kärntner Straße
Karlsplatz
Wiedner Hauptstraße

Pocket-sized Empowerment

The “wing-lifting memories” are packed in small white letters (Happy Place Portals) and are born on tour during the performance process, according to Okura’s concept.

Process chronology:

– The recipient sees the “spring meadow” (i.e. the artist in the spring meadow costume)

– Recipient receives a letter from her (small white hand-folded letter, sealed with a green & red dot sticker)

– Recipient opens the letter and reads the message it contains.

– This message, written in a benevolent attitude, is uplifting and, together with the visual impressions of this experience, develops into a wing-lifting memory, Okura describes the intention of this art performance.

– The received letter with the personal text therefore functions as a portal to a very personal mental “happy place”.

Wing-lifting memories

The letters, which Okura calls “Metta Letters”, and the messages they contain are produced during a metta meditation she has developed.

This “empowerment concept” in the form of a silent art performance has already been very well received in the past. Due to the enormous response, the artist decided to set off on the march through Vienna again this year.

Additional info

Metta letters, painted in physical form or as a concept, appear repeatedly in Okura’s works.

The last “Wienspring” Silent Art Performance took place on April 27, 2024, the last “Seasonsfreude” Silent Art Performance on December 24, 2024.

The forms of Okuräen that can also be discovered in this year’s Metta Letters are understood as portals and symbols of wing-lifting memories to mental happy places.

The Okuräe, a portmanteau word from Okuras Freudentrophäe, first appeared as a surface-filling concept in the large-format, extensive cycle of Joytrophies: Grossw(B)ildhäute, Hasenhäute und Versuchskaninchen.

#Happinent #WienerNeoAktionismus

EXHIBITED:

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CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ: ATV906