VAN Artspace: Natalia Gurova

NATALIA GUROVA
DIPLOMA. AUTOFICTION

9. 10. 2026
5:30 - 9:30 PM
SCHIMMELGASSE 17 — PAULUSPLATZ 6 (GATE/GARAGE)
1030 VIENNA

Natalia Gurova arrived at Paulusplatz in 2015 as a student, when the Site-Specific Art department of the University of Applied Arts moved there from Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz. At around the same time, she was urgently looking for a place to live and found an apartment next door to the university, at Paulusplatz 6. She has lived there ever since.

Over the years, the neighbourhood became increasingly entangled with her biography. She left the Angewandte and later graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts; found and lost jobs and relationships, watched the neighbourhood change, found a dead bird in the street, and got a cat. The wall of her apartment bordered the wall of the Site-Specific Art class.

Through installation, photography and audio, Diploma. Autofiction translates these accumulated connections into a subjective geography around Paulusplatz. The Van becomes a point of departure: a vehicle for arriving, leaving, moving and carrying things between places.

What does living in one place for years produce? When does knowing a place become a practice, and when can accumulated experience become an artwork?

VAN IS AN ARTIST-RUN SPACE IN THE BACK OF SOPHIA HATWAGNER‘S CAR