Luisa Berghammer’s exhibition not-me focuses on the shifting status of objects as they move through different systems of production and display. Engaging the prop as a form suspended between function and fiction, the exhibition attempts to trace how objects move from instruments of use to carriers of meaning without ever settling fully into either category. What unfolds is not a narrative of transformation, but of drift: a study of how objects accumulate and shed significance as they pass through distinct economies of attention.

This inquiry begins with the prop’s circulation between film, theatre, and art, and with the exposure of what normally remains supplementary to representation. Borrowed from a prop rental service, these objects arrive bearing the residue of their prior lives: contracts, labels, numbers, cataloguing systems, and informal systems of use. These linguistic and material inscriptions appear to disclose the infrastructures that typically remain peripheral to aesthetic experience. Inserted into the art space, the props are stripped of immediate functionality yet remain legible as objects shaped by bureaucratic and logistical regimes. Their presence foregrounds the institutional scaffolding through which things come to appear – whether as props, artworks, or readymades.

Crucially, the repositioning does not result in absorption. The requisites remain contractually bound to their return; Kevin’s stage is a temporary detour rather than a terminal point. They cannot be sold, cannot enter the art market’s logic of singular ownership. The work thus refuses the space’s usual operation as a site of conversion, where objects are re-authored as artworks through spatial designation alone. Instead, the rental contract functions as a legal infrastructure that seems to prevent the stabilisation of the objects’ identity as artworks. The exhibition operates within, but not fully according to, the rules of art’s economy – deliberately tethered to another system structured by circulation rather than possession.

From this refusal emerges a broader concern with how identity is assigned rather than assumed. The exhibition does not attempt to fix what these objects are; it tracks how they are classified, regulated, and made visible across contexts. In doing so, it suggests the art space as one among several institutions that authorise meaning by framing objects into legibility. Here, however, that framing never completes itself. The props occupy the space without being fully converted, and in doing so reveal the art context itself as a mechanism of classification – one that ordinarily neutralises works by erasing their prior histories in order to produce aesthetic value.

Attention therefore shifts from object to condition. Display emerges not as neutral presentation but as an active economy: a field in which meaning and value are continuously negotiated. Context here operates as a performative condition rather than a backdrop, one that determines how objects detach from their origins while remaining legible elsewhere. What defines an object as a requisite, an artwork, a readymade? How do linguistic, spatial, and legal frameworks shape or determine what can appear as art and how it circulates? Berghammer’s work maps these movements between categories, tracing how objects shift status through recontextualization and the economies that sustain them.

It is here that scale becomes operative. It invokes “elsewhere” as constitutive rather than incidental – the other sites, other systems, other scales against which the “here” of the space must be read. Scale becomes a question of relationality: not the dimensions of the object itself, but the network of references through which it signifies. The space is positioned as one location within a distributed field, connected through these scalar markers to the production sites and circulation systems that determine how objects move and what they mean across contexts.

Within this field, not-me turns toward a parallel problem: how objects mediate communication and ultimately shape who is able to speak. The work operates at the point where a functional device becomes a record of its own use – where a microphone with its cover no longer simply channels a voice but exposes the systems that determine how that voice travels. Here, the cover signals both the protection of the objects own status and conversely, an exclusion of certain voices by filtering them out. Through its focus on the tools of amplification and recording, the exhibition tries to make visible the technical and institutional scaffolding that allows speech to reach an audience while also processing, shaping, and structuring it. Mediation, here, is not a neutral conveyance; it is a political condition that governs what can be uttered, who is authorised to speak or silenced, and how speech circulates once detached from its source. 

James Meyer’s concept of the functional site offers a theoretical lens through which these operations come into focus. Rather than a single physical location, the site emerges as a network of interrelated positions – material, discursive, legal. The space, the rental service, the prop archive, the contract: each operates as a node in a system where meaning is produced through relation rather than placement. Adjusting the scale of attention – from the immediate encounter to the broader circuits of distribution – may disclose how infrastructures repeat across registers, how the protocols that organize objects at one scale echo the structures that determine their status elsewhere. 

Rather than presenting resolution, not-me sustains the object’s ambivalence, foregrounding language, display, and context as intertwined regimes of production. Attention becomes a form of engagement: a mode of reading that aims to make infrastructures visible while tracing how objects and meanings circulate across sites and scales.

Luisa Berghammer is an artist currently based in Vienna, where she studied Stage Design and Fine Arts in the department of Sculpture and Space at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Working in the media of video, sculpture and text, she is interested in the terms and conditions of contemporary (artistic) production, distribution, and reception. Berghammer often derives her material from the surplus and the vacancies arising from discrepancies; discrepancies between a product and its manufacturing conditions, between a concept and its execution, between collectivity and the ego. Her practice is shaped by the desire for a critically revised approach to autonomy. Berghammer has shown works at Rupert, LT (2025), WAF Galerie, AT (2025), Kunsthalle Wien, AT (2024), Neuer Kunstverein Wien, AT (2024), Zink Kunstverein, AT (2023), Volkstheater Dunkelkammer Wien, AT (2022), and Oststation, AT (2021).

A copy of Luisa Berghammer’s on context (2025) is available online here.