HER at Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg

The annual members’ exhibition is guest-curated by the Vienna-based curator and writer Attilia Fattori Franchini, who has developed a thematic group exhibition selected through an open call, under the title HER.

Ǫuestioning the role of technology in shaping and defining our sense of self as well as our relationship to others, Salzburger Kunstverein’s annual members’ exhibition HER drafts the human as an imperfect, imaginary, sensory-led, embodied being. An agent and an accomplice of power and its structures.

Spike Jonze’s tech drama Her (2013) depicted a romance between a man and his operating system. Set in the near future, Her captures Obama-era techno-optimism better than any other movie. It’s a time capsule, preserving dreams of progress that can now be defined almost as naive. Positioned in a utopian Los Angeles of the near future, an urban landscape untouched by wildfires, harsh immigration policies, or economic crisis, the film is one of the first to represent AI as an intimate, charming companion. No questions of how these technologies are made, for whom, or which bias they implement.

As the title suggests, Her depicts the objectification of affection while unveiling machines’ lingering desire to be emotionally intelligent.

Embracing a fascination for what is human, to touch, to feel, to embody, to delay, to camp, to construct poetry, to procrastinate, to lose, to despair, the exhibition stands as a push against algorithm-led structures and machine mediation. On the other side, it observes how these technologies have made information accessible, revealing how familial ties, property regimes, governmental and institutional procedures shape the terms of visibility, possibility, and access.

Attilia Fattori Franchini (b. 1983, Pesaro, Italy) is an independent curator and writer based in Vienna, AT. Her practice develops support tools for ephemeral practices, focusing on creating experimental and sustainable contexts for artistic production and display. She is a guest professor of Curatorial Practice at Kunstuni-Linz (2025−2027); the director of curated by festival, the founder and director of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS in Vienna, and the founder and editor of the publishing house Wild Seeds, dedicated to artists’ writings. Fattori Franchini has conceived and established the BMW Open Work by Frieze commission program (2017−2023), and is the curator of the Emergent section of miart Milan since 2018. She has recently curated the Austrian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, with a project by artist Birke Gorm (2026) and the exhibition Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage, a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024). She also has worked as a researcher at the Institut für Kunst und Kulturwissenschaften at the Academy for Fine Arts, Vienna (2021-2024).