The Institute of Queer Ecology

All forms of life on Earth are marked by change. Nature appears to be a balance between growth and decay, life and death, rise and fall. While some things return in cycles, others vanish forever.

I Wish We Had More Time examines loss—one of the fundamental experiences of existence—in its multilayered dimensions: ecological, social, and personal. Changes in climatic conditions destabilize the environmental balance of multispecies communities and confront many organisms with enormous challenges as they try to adapt. The fragility of coexistence comes to light through social crises and collaborative efforts to deal with the related impact: archives preserve queer histories and maintain continuities. Chosen families develop new forms of care and connectedness. On the personal level, loss is acutely felt in love and wistful longing, in encounters with the right person at the wrong time, in missed opportunities, in fading passion and broken trust.
Thirty-four contributors—not only artists, but scientists, writers, musicians, performers—respond to these themes, capturing direct impressions through diverse media: drawings, prints, photographs, videos, audio pieces, objects, and texts. They engage in reciprocal dialogue, create resonances, and initiate unexpected connections. In their openness, urgency, and dynamic form, they present fleeting states and conditions before these change or are lost. A focal sculpture, the Orrery of Interconnected Loss, weaves the individual works into a queer cosmology of loss.

The exhibition presents loss visually as a shared experience and thus opens up speculative scenarios: What could have been, what almost was and what may be.Akin to a time capsule, narratives, relationships, and traces are transported into future presents and, through the ongoing process of collecting and preserving, gradually grow into an archive of loss.

The Institute of Queer Ecology, co-directed by Lee Pivnik and Nicolas Baird, is a constantly developing collaborative organism aiming to put peripheral solutions to ecological crises at the centre of public awareness. Their interdisciplinary projects are embedded in the theoretical framework of queer ecology, an adaptive practice that explores interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationships. The collective questions destructive anthropocentric hierarchies and imagines a just, relational future, one in which human and more-than-human life forms coexist equally.
For the project I Wish We Had More Time, the organism expands into a network of thirty-four international contributions from the visual arts, science, literature, and performance.

With contributions by
Ramiro Ávila Macias, Maya Björnson, daniela brill estrada, Jevon Brown, Alice Bucknell, Christine Alice Cortes Cañon, Sasha Fishman, Ivana Franke & Oriana Walker, Andrea Grill, Anwyn Howarth, Sabrina Imbler, JASCHA&FRANZ, Andre Naranjo, Alina Perez, Aura Raulo & Topi Raulo & Lotta Taarasti, Jasmine Respess, Virginia G. Ruiz, Micah Schippa-Wildfong, Evan Silver aka Tiresias, misael soto, A.L. Steiner, Laurencia Strauss, Sun Belt, Wolfy Sunset, Fereshteh Toosi, Yuri Tuma, Untitled Queen, LuLu Victoria-Lacy, Vicens Vila-Coury, Jessica Ware, Oscar Wilson, Cy X, Haiwen Yu, agustine zegers
 

Curators
Stephan Kuss & Veronika Hackl

The exhibition is presented as part of the Klima Biennale Wien