Veronika Szücs

Veronika Szücs wrote and illustrated a graphic novel for the Weltmuseum Wien during her fellowship. It is an alternative guide, in which 13 exhibits from one room of the collection each tell a story as protagonists. The stories, which can be up to five pages long, are preceded by intensive research in collaboration with the curators of the various areas of the collection. The finished comic episodes, however, are not only intended to reflect the official state of research - they take this as inspiration for fiction that allows for private opinion and criticism. In this way, topics such as collection practice, restitution, and tourism, but also the experience of art, coping with grief, or nostalgia become a pretty, but only rarely truly affirmative series of picture stories that trace a walk through the Weltmuseum Wien.

Veronika Szücs studied contextual painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and comics and illustration at the Accademia di belle arti di Bologna. Born in Hungary, she has lived in Vienna since 2010 and considers herself a Viennese, a representative of a historically evolved Austro-Eastern European cosmos. Her preferred artistic formats are the graphic novel and the artist book. Her works focus on obsessive self-exploration written in travel or diary form, with poems, aphorisms and curses as textual means and drawings and collages as visual ones. She draws the urge to create from the aggressive Western kitsch to which she feels permanently exposed as a woman, as a European, and as an artist.