Artists

Yuki Okumura

Press release

The so-called white cube is a seemingly “neutral” and “pure” space with plain-white walls that is supposed to ensure the undisturbed autonomy of art. The Hauptraum, the largest gallery of Secession, is one of the earliest and most representative examples of it.

Like many artists who have exhibited here, Yuki Okumura took its empty state as a departure point for his working process. But instead of bringing works to this ideal backdrop to isolate art from the world, the artist conceived three site-specific projects to rediscover the space as a lived room interconnected with the world marked by its own conditions and contexts. For each project, Okumura designed a playful procedure and asked people related to the Hauptraum to enact it.

Wilhelm as Hauptraum (2025) documents Okumura’s interview of Wilhelm “Willi” Montibeller, the former head of Secession’s installation team who worked here for more than twenty years. Instructed by the artist, Willi personifies the space by saying “my name is Hauptraum”, “I am the space”, and so on, yet sharing his own subjective recollections of some of the exhibitions he set up in the very space, in front of a miniature model of it. The camera focuses on his hands tracing in the air the forms of works that are absent in the scene yet exist in his memory.

For Secession’s Hive Mind(s) (2025), Okumura requested the board of Secession, consisting of artists and architects, to discuss a possible renaming of the Hauptraum, a name that connotes an unwanted hierarchy by literally meaning ‘main space’. Okumura then approached our press person Ramona ‘Mona’ Heinlein (who is me myself, in charge of this very text co-edited by the artist) and had her translate a German transcript of the board’s meeting into English all alone, verbally. As a result, the speaker in the video seems to have multiple personalities, just like how the board has many voices internally yet speaks as one voice outwardly, mediated by the press office. In a nod to the ‘hive mind’, a sci-fi term for collective consciousness, the monologue is accompanied by footage of beehives on the roof of Secession. Several colonies of bees live there, taken care of by one of our current chief installers Hans Weinberger, a trained beekeeper.