To mark the 25th anniversary of the MQ, Elfie Semotan has photographed 25 personalities who share a special connection to the institution. Through her imagery, the individual character of each subject and their personal bond with the MQ comes to life, revealing it as a shared creative and living space. The graphic design by Beda Achermann extends this narrative further, staging the memories of the protagonists – drawn sometimes from private life, sometimes from a professional context – as an evocation of a place where stories, encounters, and ideas have been accumulating for a quarter of a century.

May 22 – September 25, 2026

Linz, Austria

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Energie AG Upper Austria and OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH are once again presenting an impressive exhibition of current award winners at the Energie AG headquarters. The exhibition features Caroline Lerbro, winner of the Talent Promotion Award; Martin Veigl, winner of the Klemens Brosch Prize; Ilona Ágnes Tömő & Katja Vassilieva, winners of the Studio Residency; and Erli Grünzweil, recipient of the WHAT A VIEW! Photography Prize. Elfie Semotan joins the exhibition as an established and celebrated voice in contemporary photography.  

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The exhibition includes photographs by Elfie Semotan from the series Untitled (Marfa), Texas, taken in 2016 during a journey to Marfa, Texas –  a desert town closely associated with the minimalist artist Donald Judd. Driving through vast open plains marked by extensive fencing and privately owned land, Elfie Semotan found the central motif for the series. The fences, shaping both access and visibility, reflect the tension between openness and restriction that runs through the landscape.

May 21 – November 8, 2026

Graz, Austria

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Elfie Semotan’s flower still lifes, spanning from the late 1970s to the present, are featured in the exhibition "30% Dandelion" at Kunsthaus Graz. The dandelion – both plant and cultural symbol – embodies quiet strength and resilience: unobtrusive yet persistent, it adapts, returns, and resists. The exhibition reflects on the fragility of the present while also opening up the familiar, striking, and immersive aesthetics of the flower and its expressive vitality. At its core are themes of recurrence, symbiotic relations, and transition – poetic, political, and ecological.

March 11, 2026

London, United Kingdom

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Elfie Semotan will participate in a panel discussion at the Austrian Cultural Forum London as part of the UK launch of "Belladonna: Austrian Women Artists 1960–1980", a landmark publication compiled by Gerald Matt, dedicated to a generation of pioneering women artists who shaped Austria’s cultural landscape during a period of radical creative change.​ The publication brings together interviews with forty artists, including Renate Bertlmann, VALIE EXPORT, Heidi Harsieber, Martha Jungwirth, Birgit Jürgenssen, Kiki Kogelnik, Friedl Kubelka, Maria Lassnig, and Elfie Semotan, offering first-hand accounts of the artistic environments, challenges, and achievements that defined the era.

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Following an introduction by Gerald Matt in conversation with publisher Benedikt Föger, Semotan will join Austrian photographer Rita Nowak to discuss their photographic practices and perspectives across generations, reflecting on the evolving role of women in photography and the visual arts.

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December 4, 2025– February 7, 2026

Vienna, Austria

The exhibition brings together two artistic positions rooted in different generations, media, and realms of experience – and yet they communicate with each other in surprisingly precise ways. The Austrian photographer Elfie Semotan (b. 1941) and French-Moroccan painter Rebecca Brodskis (b. 1988) meet here not as contrasts, but as resonating bodies: two perspectives surveying the same uncertain terrain – that intermediate space where observation, memory, and imagination flow into one another.

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In the exhibition, Semotan's photographs are largely empty of people – her private and transient spaces in Jennersdorf, New York and Long Island – rooms veiled by curtains, that hold their tension precisely through the absence of a figure. Where people do appear, they are seen only from behind: Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon – insinuations of bodies rather than presences. Her pictures operate like scenes after a departure or just before a return, hovering in a space of abeyance and expectation. Lucid and still, these image spaces reflect Semotan's sustained interest in what is fragile, transient, and possible.

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November 8, 2025– January 4, 2026

Valletta, Malta

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The exhibition "BLOW-UP" includes works by Elfie Semotan from the 1960s and early 1970s, a formative period in her development as a photographer. An editorial campaign for German magazine "Twen", staged with model Helena Dubova, transforms an everyday urban observation into a stylised narrative that blurs the boundary between fashion imagery and social reality. The exhibition also features works from Elfie Semotan’s creative collaboration with filmmaker and photographer John Cook.

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November 8, 2025– January 4, 2026

Valletta, Malta

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The exhibition "BLOW-UP" includes works by Elfie Semotan from the 1960s and early 1970s, a formative period in her development as a photographer. An editorial campaign for German magazine "Twen", staged with model Helena Dubova, transforms an everyday urban observation into a stylised narrative that blurs the boundary between fashion imagery and social reality. The exhibition also features works from Elfie Semotan’s creative collaboration with filmmaker and photographer John Cook.

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