EVENTS

Opening: 29 May, 2025 @ 16-20h (performance by Bicha Boo Collective, Mzamo Nondlwana & Pêdra Costa)

Opening hours during Independent Space Index 2025: 30 May - 01 June, 2025 @ 14h-18h

Performances: Saturdays, 31 May •. 7 June •. 28 June @ 18h

Closing event: 28 June 2025 @ 18h (performance by: Sheri Avraham and friends) 

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Artist talks: (further info on online-access via insta @club_havera)

03 June 2025 @ 19h: Join for a conversation with the artists Ed Firth (UK), Sheri Avraham (IL), Gabriel Moncayo Asan (EC), Galo Moncayo Asan (EC), Sascha Knorr (DE), Parham Rostan Abadi (IR).

19 June 2025 @ 21h: Join for a conversation with the artist John Hanning together with Mag.a Andrea Brunner (Managing Director, Aids Hilfe Wien)

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Community Meetings:

(No registration required / Open to all who are curious, concerned, or simply desire to listen and learn)

5 June 2025 @ 19:00 - 20:30
Moderated by Mag. Willi Waitz (Gruppenpsychoanalyse)
Gruppenselbsterfahrung – angeleitete Werkbetrachtung und offener Austausch
In this Community Meeting, we invite visitors to a shared moment of reflection and conversation. Under the theme Gruppenselbsterfahrung, we will explore selected artworks from the exhibition Beyond the High through guided observation and personal responses. This session encourages an open exchange—without judgment or pressure—on the themes, emotions, and questions that arise.
Together, we will slow down, take a closer look, and reflect on how the works resonate with our own experiences. The aim is not to interpret art "correctly," but to create a collective space for awareness, vulnerability, and mutual listening. No prior knowledge is needed—just curiosity and openness.

12 June 2025 @ 19:00 - 20:30
With Mag. Raimund Fichter-Wöß (Gesundheitspsychologische Praxis Gleichanders)
Publikumsgespräch zu Scham, internalisierter Homophobie und Gesundheitspolitik
This Community Meeting opens up a space for collective conversation on some of the deeper emotional and political layers that Beyond the High touches on. Together with the audience, we will talk about shame, internalized homophobia, and their entanglement with health politics—particularly in queer and gay male contexts.
This is an invitation to share, ask, and listen. The session aims to connect personal experience with broader social structures, and to hold space for both vulnerability and critique. How do systems shape our self-image? What remains unsaid in public health discourse? And how can we rethink care beyond stigma?

19 June 2025 @ 19:00 - 20:30
With Mag.a (FH) Miriam Alvarado-Dupuy M.Sc. (Leiterin an.doc.stelle) and Katharina Schwarz (Psychotherapeutin)
Q&A – Perspektiven aus Psychologie und Sozialarbeit zu Chemsex und sozialer Gerechtigkeit
In this Community Meeting, we open the floor to voices from psychology and social work to explore the complexities of chemsex through the lens of care, access, and social justice. How do professionals navigate the tension between individual autonomy, harm reduction, and structural inequality? What support systems exist—and which are still missing?
This Q&A offers space for questions, exchange, and critical reflection. Together, we’ll look at how mental health, substance use, and queer lives intersect, and how a more just and inclusive approach to care might look like. (German with English whisper translation)

26 June 2025 @ 19:00 - 20:30
With by M.A. Daniel Ibel (Psychotherapie, Coach, Supervision) and Matthias Seidl (CheckIt!, Suchthilfe Wien)
Q&A – Chancen der Psychotherapie und Freizeitdrogenberatung mit Chemsex-Schwerpunkt
This Community Meeting focuses on the therapeutic possibilities and challenges when working with people who engage in chemsex. What can specified psychotherapy and counseling on safer drug usage offer in terms of support, stabilization, and healing? How can it respond to the specific needs of queer communities without pathologizing desire or pleasure?
In this Q&A, a psychotherapist and a social worker from CheckIt! Invite the participants into an open conversation about approaches, boundaries, and hopes for a more affirming mental health landscape. We will explore how therapy and a non-judgemental advice centre can become a resource—grounded in respect, empathy, and social awareness.

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THE ARTISTS

John Hanning is a Visual and Literary artist.  He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, where he creates collages, books, and paintings.  His work explores themes of anxiety, surveillance, paranoia, the bankrupt morality of religion, commentary on American values, the LGBTQ and AIDS movements.  Hanning’s work has been shown at Spritmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden; the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; and The Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph, Canada.  His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art Research Library, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art Research Library, New York, NY, the New York Public Library Research Division, New York, NY; the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, CA; and Camera Austria Public Library, Graz, Austria.

Ed Firth is the East London artist and writer behind the Pound Shop zine cycle and the ongoing Horny & High anthology comic series exploring British chemsex subculture among gay men in 2010’s London. Vol 1 was shortlisted for the Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition out of 115 entries, and described by queer comics legend Ralf König as telling “a truth only the bowels can understand”. Of Vol 2, Attitude magazine said "Subject matter, storytelling and sheer artistry collide with exquisite dexterity... The endless chase of the high... the cruel psychosis of comedown... powerfully captured here. Incredible work.”

Gabi Moncayo Asan’s video installation constructs an immersive architecture of memory, drawing from a personal archive of self-portraits and images taken during chemsex gatherings he once inhabited. These visual fragments—at once intimate and disquieting—form a nonlinear map of presence, erasure, and return. Projected within a sensory space that resists voyeurism, the work reframes exposure as self-authorship. Accompanying the installation is an audio collaboration with Sheri Avraham, in which the two artists trace the different stages of recovery—not as a fixed path, but as a dialogic unfolding of grief, clarity, and reclamation. Together, their voices inhabit a space between confession and resistance, insisting that survival is not a final chapter but a continual, communal act of becoming.

Sheri Avraham’s live performance extends the audio collaboration with Gabi Moncayo Asan, they will translate the layered stages of recovery into embodied language. Moving between spoken word, fragmented gesture, and sonic disruption, Avraham gives physical form to the intangible textures of survival—grief, resistance, clarity, return. Their performance does not illustrate the audio work; it inhabits it, refracting its emotional cadences through the body and voice. In doing so, Avraham creates a living archive of care, where vulnerability is not exposed but choreographed, shared, and held.

Galo Moncayo Asan’s sculptural works serve as critiques of digital intimacy and the illusion of connection. Drawing from the visual language of social apps, these sculptures expose the economies of desire and disposability that shape queer digital life. Through acts of distortion and subversion, Moncayo Asan’s work challenges the corporate utopias of digital capitalism and asks: what does agency look like when the terms of engagement are no longer ours to write?

Parham Rostam Abadi’s diary traces queer desire through kink and chemsex, shaped by migration and exile. Each chapter unfolds a date, a body, a border—revealing how intimacy becomes entangled with representation, otherness, and survival. 

Sascha Knorr's photo series traces the arc of chemsex realities. From moments of euphoria and intimacy to the depths of addiction and mental and physical collapse, and offers a haunting, empathetic and at times harsh meditation on pleasure, compulsion, and the price of escape.

Jonas Baur (he/him//any) - applied theatre practitioner based in Vienna. Working as facilitator of transdisciplinary, community based research and creation processes. Here he's focusing on the fields of radical hospitality, tender masculinities and crossmedia remembrance work. In this project he joined the production team. Together with Maél he develops a poetic intervention weaving into the performance by Sheri.

Maél T. Alfaro (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and decolonial philologist from Cádiz, Spain, working across literature, music, and performance. Based in Vienna, their work focuses on personal and collective storytelling to observe, deconstruct, and resist the pains of capitalist violence—addressing topics such as queerness, classism, colonization, among others.