CARBON 12 invites everyone to attend The Narrative of Decline, a group exhibition that brings together ten artists. It explores the concept of decline (social, cultural, and emotional) not as something purely tragic, but as a state of transformation and aesthetic potential. Curated by Austrian artist and curator Bernhard Buhmann, the show will run through 6 November 2025.
The Narrative of Decline, inspired by sociologist Roger Caillois’s notion of “illinx” (a dizzying loss of balance that evokes both terror and exhilaration), reflects on what happens when established structures falter. It prompts visitors to consider the beauty and tension within collapse: what new possibilities arise as certainty dissolves? How does art not only mourn decline, but also reimagine, stylise, and interrogate it?
Among the displayed works are those by Afghanistan-born artist Tamina Amadyar, Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda, and Syrian-Canadian artist Nour Malas. Amadyar creates large-scale, colour-intense abstract paintings that draw on personal memory, migration, and space. Ben Hamouda’s work often engages cultural-religious symbols, rituals, and generational legacies, while Malas channels emotional and political resonance through gestural, dreamlike compositions that blur figures, memories, and landscapes.
American artist Ridley Howard approaches painting as a study of colour and form. His luminous works, spanning abstraction, portraiture, and landscape, distil visual experience into serene, balanced arrangements that evoke stillness and introspection. German artist Christoph Ruckhäberle, a prominent member of the New Leipzig School, creates vibrant, rhythmic compositions populated by stylised figures. His canvases transform everyday gatherings into scenes of visual harmony and symbolic interaction through geometry, gesture, and colour. Meanwhile, Austria-based painter Maureen Kägi explores the intersection of control and chance through layered lines and acrylic pen work. Her ethereal surfaces evoke motion, blur, and dissolution: visual metaphors for the erosion of form and meaning.
The exhibition also features four Austrian artists: Monika Grabuschnigg, Claudia Larcher, Oliver Laric, and Philip Mueller. Grabuschnigg transforms domestic objects (clothing, household appliances, and plants) into sculptural reinterpretations that probe themes of longing, commodification, loss, and melancholy. Larcher works with video, animation, collage, and installation to investigate notions of home, memory, and identity; recently, she’s turned to AI to question its societal and perceptual implications.
Laric examines authorship and originality through sculpture and video. He remixes preexisting photos, animations, and sculptures to reveal how digital culture destabilises the idea of the “unique.” Meanwhile, Mueller’s large-scale, symbol-rich paintings, which often feature animals, merge mythology, religion, and pop culture.
For more information about The Narrative of Decline, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in viewing Whispers of the Past and The Imaginary Museum.
