Play Dead (since 2023) by Karolin Braegger stages fashion as a theatre of identity formation, appropriation, desire, and decay. Mannequins carry out an endless dialogue of quotations, competing self-images, and shifting personae, while constructions of the self continually affirm, contradict, and displace one another.

The work engages with questions of self-fashioning and authorship within a fashion culture shaped by quotations, references, and rapidly fading trends. Through the use of found texts, the boundaries between original and copy become increasingly blurred. Appropriation emerges as a productive strategy through which identities are continuously performed and reshaped.

Conceived as an installation, the work employs mannequins as stand-ins for performers. In her artistic practice, Karolin Braegger frequently works with support and display structures, such as wooden painting supports, mannequins, and similar devices. Rather than functioning as neutral carriers, these elements operate somewhere between infrastructure and artwork: painting supports become bags, mannequins become actors, and displays develop a sculptural autonomy. The mannequins appear to speak through their T-shirts, which function simultaneously as image carriers, costumes, and projection surfaces, presenting an ongoing sequence of statements. In this way, the T-shirts become temporary hosts for borrowed voices, unstable identities, and shifting positions, emphasizing the transience of such identity-forming assertions. A web of seduction, imitation, transference, and idealization unfolds.

For the opening of the installation, Karolin Braegger reads an excerpt from Play Dead on site, thereby entering the work she herself has created.

Karolin Braegger is based between Vienna and Zurich. She works across visual art, fashion, and performance. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts, a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she studied with Heimo Zobernig, and a Diploma in Fashion Design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her practice explores the intersections of sculpture, costume, installation, and display. Braegger creates hybrid objects that move between sculpture, prop, garment, fashion item, and scenographic element. Often rooted in textile forms, her works combine sculptural, performative, and installation-based strategies, evoking bodily presence while functioning simultaneously as objects, figures, props, and support structures.

Central to her work is an interest in supportive and relational roles, explored through collaboration, delegation, and shared authorship. Through these shifting positions, she investigates visibility, labour, intimacy, and staging. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Chess Club, Basel; City Galerie Wien, Vienna; Third Space/City, Vienna; Heckmannufer, Berlin; Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna; City Galerie Wien at
Liste Art Basel; Kunstforum, Vienna; Medium P/Borgenheim Rosenhoff, Basel; City Galerie Wien at Miart, Milan; All Stars, Lausanne; Cabanon, Paris; PROVENCE Pavillon, Zurich; Pina, Vienna; Kunsthaus Wien; Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich; Heiligenkreuzerhof, Vienna; Exile, Vienna; and Sangt Hipolyt, Berlin. She was a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2023, provided by the Canton of Zurich, and completed a residency in Genoa in 2025, provided by the City of Zurich.

Date: Thursday 25.06.2026
Time: 6pm⁠
Meeting point:

Süd - Da Capo Bar
Bahnhofplatz 15, 8001 

Wheelchair accessible