guest room: "messy"

Guest Room aims to inspire collaboration and creative exchange. In this edition, we welcome a trio of curators from FOTO ARSENAL WIEN: Marit Lena Herrmann, Mona Schubert and Felix Hoffmann.

Together, they introduce the theme for your submissions:

"Messy"

In a world that celebrates perfection and control, we’re shifting our focus to the raw, the chaotic, the unfiltered. Unlike order, messiness embraces contradictions. Messiness might exist in the physical – cluttered spaces, disordered environments, technical glitches, unruly bodies – or in the psychological – heartbreak, obsession, tangled relationships, uncertain transitions. Labelling someone as ‘messy’ can serve as a tool of control and oppression – or it can foster agency and resistance. The theme also opens up a media-reflective perspective: How messy is photography itself? Historically tied to ideas of evidence, clarity, and control, the photographic medium has often served to categorize, to frame, to fix. But images can slip. They can blur, rupture, leak – challenging notions of legibility, authority and normativity. The medium’s very processes, from exposure to editing to dissemination, and even its (archival) transmission carry traces of imperfection, chance, and failure. We’re looking for artistic contributions that break rules, reject polished surfaces, take risks, and that aren’t afraid to reveal the cracks – works that reveal stories without playing it safe.