shared evening: SOLACE (working title) by Michele Chu (HK) & Sara Lanner (AT) // No Place Like Home by Malika Fankha (CH/AT)
Fri 14.11.2025 // 19.30
In cooperation with netzwerkTanz Vorarlberg
Photo: Sarah Mistura
Photo: Malika Fankha
Fri 14.11.2025 // 19.30
Work-in-progress showings
Bräuhausgasse 40, 1050 Vienna // pay as you wish/can // drinks & food // Limited space, please register via imflieger@gmail.com
A shared evening with work-in-progress (dance-) performances, which were further developed in the context of Im_flieger CHANGING SPACES Vienna-Vorarlberg and Im_flieger SUPPORTS.
CHANGING SPACES Vienna–Vorarlberg 2025
Im_flieger Vienna in cooperation with netzwerkTanz
Residency in Dornbirn: 22.9.–19.10.2025
More about netzwerkTanz here.
SOLACE (working title) // Michele Chu (HK) & Sara Lanner (AT)
SOLACE (working title) emerges from a year-long dialogue between artists Michele Chu (Hong Kong) and Sara Lanner (Vienna), who met in 2022 during a residency in Hong Kong. Through voice memos, images, and sound recordings exchanged across 10,000 kilometers, they explore themes of comfort and consolation – both in their artistic practices and personal lives.
Consolation, a deeply human and psychological phenomenon, sustains us from childhood to old age, offering resilience in the face of life’s challenges. During their remote residency, Chu and Lanner imagine spaces of solace – reflecting on how physical and aesthetic experiences can foster collective comfort.
Artistic direction: Michele Chu & Sara Lanner
Performance, choreography: Sara Lanner
Text: Michele Chu, Sara Lanner
Video footage: Michele Chu
Dramaturgical support: Marco Santi
Thanks to: netzwerkTanz, Im_flieger
No Place Like Home // Malika Fankha (CH/AT)
No Place Like Home addresses the silence surrounding sexual violence within family systems, aiming to raise awareness of our collective responsibility and expose incestuous behavior hidden behind the shield of privacy. Malika Fankha examines systemic abuse and manipulative mechanisms on legal, neurological, and political levels and their lifelong consequences for survivors: What values do we internalize after years of humiliation and violence? How can a body whose boundaries have been repeatedly violated reclaim its autonomy? What concepts of truth emerge when an entire environment’s main narrative is built on lies? How can home be associated with safety and security when it has been a crime scene for years?
The piece meanders through physical and psychological states that reveal the ambivalence between repulsion and attraction toward one’s own and other bodies. At times trapped in endlessly recurring spirals of memory, at times hopeful, empowered by queer desire.
Artistic direction, composition, performance: Malika Fankha
Dramaturgy: Asher O’Gorman
Production: mollusca productions
Co-production: brut Wien
Residency partners: Im_flieger Vienna, Tanzhaus Zürich
Supported by the City of Vienna Cultural Department.
Malika Fankha (CH/AT) studied theatre in Zurich, contemporary dance at SEAD (Salzburg) as well as the NYU Tisch School of Performing Arts (New York) and works internationally as a dancer, poet and DJ. Fankha is interested in diverting predictable narratives and carving out spaces for both precarious intimacy and campy melodrama. Their work unfolds structures and politics of desire by looking for softer weavings between sensation and sociality with the aim to build an obstinate yet malleable matrix of connections. www.malikafankha.com
Michele Chu (HK) (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist engaged in practices of intimacy and ritual. In her experimentations with different materials and elements, she investigates how the body manifests and adapts in situations of public tension or private introspection. As one of the many emerging artists practicing in post-handover Hong Kong, Chu examines ephemerality and ludic play in relation to intense social change and communal relationships. Her work has been shown at Para Site (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), Delfina Foundation at Young Space (London), 1a space (Hong Kong) and Negative Space (Hong Kong). Her debut solo exhibition at PHD Group “you, trickling,” was featured in The New York Times, Artforum, ArtReview Asia, Frieze, Ocula, and other publications. She is a recipient of soundpocket’s Artist Support Programme from 2020–21 and the HART Studio Grant in 2021 and was in residence at London’s Delfina Foundation as part of their “Performance as Process” program in 2023. www.phdgroup.art/artists/michele-chu
Sara Lanner (AT) (*1991) is a choreographer and visual artist based in Vienna. In her work she deals with questions of cultural and (body) linguistic identity and explores spaces between trust and dependency. The ambivalences of interpersonal relationships and their points of contact as well as our material and ecological realities form the beginnings of her artistic reflections. Most recently, her dance performance WEAVING INFRASTRUCTURES (2024) was shown at brut Wien and Mining Minds (2022) at the ImPulsTanz Festival. For her work MINE (2021), Sara Lanner was awarded the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance. Further presentations: Tanzquartier Wien, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Galerie 5020 Salzburg, Neue Galerie/BRUSEUM Graz, MIPAF Macau/China, HART Haus Hongkong, Künstlerhaus Nürnberg, OK Offenes Kulturhaus Linz, among others. www.saralanner.com