fellows

Ezra Šimek, Joyful Flame, 2022, video still

Ezra Šimek (b. 1997) is an artist, writer and cultural worker based in Vienna. They received their BA in Photography from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts, their MA in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia, and their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In their work, Šimek primarily deals with queer identities and linguistic sensitivity, expressed through various time-based media, site-responsive installations, sound works, and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct akin to mythology, fostering synergy among multiple subjectivities to envision a new, inclusive, speculative reality.

They were an artist-in-residence at Cité internationale des arts Paris (2024) and at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York (2023). Their work and films have been presented at, among others, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (2024), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2024), Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2023), Czech Center New York (2023), Medium Gallery, Bratislava (2023), Diagonale Festival, Graz (2023), Fotogalerie Wien (2023), National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Světova 1, Prague (2022), VUNU Gallery, Košice (2022), and Haus Wien (2021). They are a recipient of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award (2022).

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1. Ezra Šimek, Joyful Flame, 2022, video still; 2.-3. Ezra Šimek, Bodie, 2022, video still; 4. Sunset Village, installation view: Sunset Village, 2024, Sala Terrena, Vienna, photo by: Jorit Aust; 5.-6. Bodie, installation view: all that is solid melds in the air, 2022-23, National Gallery Prague, photo by: Jan Kolský; 7. every day, every week another historical image floods our screens, 2024, video still; 8.-9. installation view: We are what we are, but it is not evil, 2022, Medium Gallery, Bratislava, photo by: Michaela Prablesková; 10. No offense, but, performance, installation view: ...and they lived…, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2024, photo by: Lujza Stopková; 11. the trans masculine urge to not take up space, unless you want me to, then I can, as long as you‘re sure that‘s cool, vinyl, installation view: Hello my name is, 2022, SVETOVA 1, Prague, photo by: Světlana Malinová; 12. Joyful Flame, installation view: You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating, 2022, VUNU Gallery, Košice, photo by: Tibor Czitó
Artist statement

My work orbits around queer world-building, speculative resistance, and the emotional architectures that hold us together. I move across film, installation, sound, text, and performance - often overlapping rather than separate - guided by a neurodivergent lens that resists linearity, embraces contradiction, and seeks out alternate forms of storytelling.

At the heart of my process is a blending of academic research and emotional intuition: theory meets social media scrolls, personal memory meets archival discovery. I often start from things that feel small or scattered - something I saw on Instagram, a meme, a line in a book, a protest sign, a memory, a TikTok - and build outward into layered narratives that merge the everyday with the mythic. I piece together theory, lived experience, speculative fiction, and pop culture to construct something that holds both truth and fantasy.

Pop-cultural archetypes and outlaws act as recurring companions; not only the witch or the cowboy, but also knights, pirates, fairies, monsters, rats, clowns, saints... I’m interested in how these figures can be reclaimed, re-scripted, and inhabited anew; how they can carry queer and trans futures on their backs.

My aesthetic language leans into the theatrical: heightened, textured, emotionally saturated. I’m drawn to formats that allow for rupture and exaggeration. Spectacle and softness co-exist. Song-like structures and dreamlike pacing shape many of my works, offering alternatives to dominant historical narratives and conventional plot arcs. I’m more interested in moods, echoes, and repetition than in resolution. Things that feel like a memory, a dream, or a feeling you can’t explain.

Rather than clean narratives, I aim to create atmospheres, emotional landscapes, and alternate timelines. I think of my work as a form of resistance: against erasure, against linearity, against the demand to explain oneself. I want to build spaces where different temporalities and bodies can exist, spaces for collective care, rage, joy, softness, grief. Spaces where queer and trans people aren’t just surviving, but scheming, loving, joking, dreaming.

Autistic perception, with its intensity, sensitivity, and unique sense of time, is foundational to how I experience and make work. I see this not as a limitation, but as a tool – a way of sensing patterns and dissonance, of building archives that feel, sing, resist. Through character creation, visual language, and emotionally charged environments, I construct spaces of care, rebellion, and transformation. These are sites where identities slip and shimmer, where the past is reimagined, and where strange, defiant, collective joy becomes its own form of resistance. The joy of being an outlaw.

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