Anna Franceschini: Nights Out

KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS presents NIGHTS OUT, Anna Franceschini’s first institutional solo exhibition in Vienna jointly curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini and Ilaria Gianni.

In her practice, Anna Franceschini explores the multiple ways of displaying commodities. Underlying her observation of reality is cinema through its constituent elements: movement, light, framing, and editing. Kinetic sculptures, choreographed performances, ​“bachelor(ette) machines” — which inject femininity into the Duchampian idea of apparatus, and Xerox copies, are for the artist ​“a cinema by other means.” Franceschini’s work seeks to expand the concept of animation in sculptural terms. Reversing the ends of the discussion about ​“cinema as machine,” she redirects the gaze toward the hypothesis of a ​“machine as cinema.” By creating sculptures intended as moving images, she turns commodities into quasi-living beings and fabricates devices whose subjectivity is emphasized within a mise-en-scène.

Three dancing machines haunt KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS’ blacked-out space, activating abstract mechanical coreographies. Human presence is signified by flowing wigs, which move seductively, automatically, disturbingly, or even pathetically, following the rhythm of the pole itself. The dance is repetitive, scattered, infinite, showing both desire and fatigue, as if performing some type of ritual.

Constructed as a theatrical body, NIGHTS OUT unveils animated machine-like characters as subjects. It invites the public to consider how objects can take on meanings beyond the function for which they were designed, challenging normativity and opening up new perspectives on the material world around us. In the exhibition, the sculptures appear as unsettling traces of a relentless drive for productivity that erodes both economic structures and interpersonal bonds.

NIGHTS OUT becomes the stage for the expression of both the real existence of the technical artifacts and the fictive flicker of life activated by the consumerist logic. It unveils the rhythms woven by capitalism into machines, their tireless dances of labor and desire.

Born of a sequence of incessant, overwhelming, and weary gestures — rituals fractured and worn, echoing the unyielding drive for efficiency — Franceschini’s animated beings seem always on the verge of becoming, forever renegotiating the shape of their purpose. The sculptures evoke a certain pressure to perform, enhanced by the ferocious exuberance of movement, as much as an inevitable exhaustion. It becomes clear that the spectacle the artist has presented is not a dreamscape, but a scenario very close to reality — one where machines transform into bodies we can relate to.

NIGHTS OUT at KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS is the first solo presentation of Anna Franceschini’s work in Austria. Premiering together with curated by, the gallery-led festival, fostering international critical discourse and opening on the 5th of September 2025, it can be visited during Vienna Contemporary (11th ‑14th of September 2025), with curator-led tours available during its opening hours.

The publication Machines Wear Costumes, edited by Attilia Fattori Franchini and Ilaria Gianni, reflects on Franceschini’s oeuvre and will be published in 2025 by LENZ PRESS.

The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.

Special thanks to Galleria VISTAMARE, Simone Battisti, Leonardo Caldonazzo, Margherita Castiglioni, Andrea Fustinoni, Anna Maria Giallombardo and Fabiana Novembre for their support on the realization of this project.