The question How To Live Together, the title of an exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien running until October 15, is answered within five minutes of entering the first of two massive gallery spaces dedicated to the show: not easily, cacophonously.

Its mixed-media nature means that the myriad installations, videos, sculptures, photographs, and even an animatronic talking sculpture of a life-sized man combine to immediately overwhelm the viewer. How do we live together right now? Like this—with endless voices talking over one another ad nauseam, with countless noises thrown into the fray, with no one able to focus or listen in the face of so much distracting stimulation. The next question with which the exhibition grapples, then, becomes how can we live together—and how can we do better than what we’re doing right now?
 
Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger