With Lesbian Tentacles and other Beings, Qwien presents an exhibition by artist Katrina Daschner, whose work has for many years been among the defining positions in queer-feminist contemporary art in Austria. Drawing on film, performance, installation, and sculpture, Daschner develops visual worlds in which the boundaries between humans, animals, plants, and other beings dissolve. Tentacle-like bodies, hybrid figures, and ambiguous encounters populate the exhibition, proposing alternative forms of community, desire, and belonging. In place of hierarchies: connections and processes of mutual dependency. Tentacles, entanglements, and fluid bodies stand for connectedness, care, and the possibility of reimagining social orders.

The exhibition can equally be read as an engagement with the absences in lesbian history. For decades, many lesbian lived realities went largely undocumented or were excluded from historical narratives. Daschner approaches these historical gaps not through documentary reconstruction, but through imagination, embodiment, and fiction. She responds with creativity: with figures and spaces in which alternative forms of memory and community are imagined.

At the intersection of performance, film, and installation, the artist develops poetic scenarios that negotiate questions of gender, power, and visibility. Lesbian Tentacles and other Beings opens onto queer histories that cannot be told linearly, but persist as living networks of relationships, bodies, and experiences.

Katrina Daschner, born 1973 in Hamburg, lives and works as an artist and filmmaker in Vienna. She studied sculpture and Transmedia Art under Brigitte Kowanz at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions and at film festivals. In addition, Daschner has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Art and Design Linz, and served as theory curator at Tanzquartier Wien.