In 1982, the artist Margot Pilz brought a beach to a Baroque square in Vienna.
For a few weeks during a festival, people vacationed at her Italian coast-inspired installation in the city’s bustling Karlsplatz. They lounged in deck chairs under a palm tree and parasols, sipping beer and squishing their toes in the sand while an inflatable whale in the square’s reflecting pool played recordings of humpback whale songs.
Today we live in a very different time. And Pilz has updated her installation, “Kaorle in Karlsplatz,” for the Klima Biennale Wien — Vienna Climate Biennale — an environmental art festival that runs through May 10 and brings together artists, art students and thinkers from around the world to share art, music, and ideas that inspire festivalgoers to imagine a world where people, plants and animals can all thrive.
The citywide event consists of two exhibitions in the KunstHausWien museum, 10 art installations in public spaces, 10 resilience-focused redesigns of outdoor sites, along with an interactive artistic intervention at a boat in the Danube canal, and other exhibitions, performances, talks and workshops.
As part of the Biennale’s public spaces program, titled “(No) Funny Games: Or how we learned to start caring and love the dystopia,” Pilz has reimagined her beach in the aftermath of climate change and human-caused environmental destruction. In the updated installation, a storm has wrecked a boat sculpture and ripped up trees. Plastic and fishing nets litter the shore. Nearby, faux palm trees, which the artist Pia Siren made out of construction lifts and plastic tarpaulins, comment on the disappearance of beaches as billions of tons of sand are used to manufacture concrete, in a process that emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
Yet despite the dystopian elements, Pilz wants visitors to feel lifted up.
“I hope that ‘Kaorle in Karlsplatz 2026’ is a place of hope for youth and for all of us,” she said in a video interview.
After all, she and festival organizers noted, Karlsplatz beachgoers can still savor a sense of togetherness and fantasy as whale song washes over them. They can partake in Biennale performances, including a children’s choir, musical acts and a communal toast to Vienna’s clean and swimmable waters.
But Pilz hopes the unsettling setting will prompt conversations about transforming our relationship with nature and each other. “Art can open up new perspectives and create strong images and stories that allow us to think about alternative ways of living,” said Gerlinde Riedl, the director of KunstHausWien, the museum that convenes the Biennale, in a video interview.
It is fitting that KunstHausWien, Austria’s first government-designated “green” museum, started the Biennale in 2024. The museum was founded and designed by the Austrian artist Friedrichshain Hundertwasser, who argued for harmonizing architecture with nature.
“Many of his contemporaries considered these ideas utopian, but today they feel more urgent than ever,” Riedl said of the artist, who lived from 1928 to 2000. The museum building itself grew out of Hundertwasser’s philosophy. Warped floors mimic the undulating earth. Wonky windows and mosaics seem to swim up walls like microorganisms. What Hundertwasser called plant “tenants” dwell amid the artworks, reside on the roof and poke out of windows.
For the 2026 Biennale, KunstHausWien has opened two exhibitions. “Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures” (through Feb. 14, 2027) invites 14 artists to explore connections between colonialism, migration, Indigenous knowledge and biodiversity. In the other exhibition, “I Wish We Had More Time” (through Aug. 9), 34 contributors with the Institute of Queer Ecology present nearly 50 works that make biodiversity loss more relatable by linking it to personal losses.
“For me, and I think for most of us, the place of heartbreak in a relationship and the heartbreak I feel thinking about species extinction are right next to each other in the heart,” said Nicolas Baird, the group’s co-director, in a video interview.
As part of the exhibition, Haiwen Yu contributed a sculpture of people embracing and crying as fish swim up their tears. Yu, who uses the pronouns they/him, was reflecting on the closure of a gay bar where they had met a former partner. They were reminded of salmon losing their spawning habitat after a river is dammed.
When Yu fired the ceramic sculpture, the base cracked. So the only thing holding the piece together is the hug.
The contributing artists and scientists were given freedom to collaborate and work outside their disciplines. The field of queer ecology questions categories and binaries, and promotes addressing environmental crises through kinship across different species.
In the Biennale’s “(No) Funny Games” program, 10 artists created playful yet thought-provoking interventions in public spaces, such as Pilz’s beach and Siren’s palm trees.
As part of “(No) Funny Games,” the Bolivian artist River Claure is displaying a series of printed banners in a piece titled “On the count of three, we destroy everything.” The banners feature still images from a video in which Claure constructed a cardboard replica of the Gate of the Sun — built by the Tiwanaku people in what is now Bolivia circa A.D. 600 to 700. Then he blew it up. Claure was inspired by children who build structures with blocks, then gleefully wreck them.
“In this conversation about climate change, we’re just thinking about conservation,” he said in a video interview, “and I think we need to destroy things to conserve.”
It is easy to think of things that may need to be destroyed, or at least gently phased out. The Biennale’s theme, “Unspeakable Worlds,” arose from the festival director Sithara Pathirana’s disillusionment amid the rapid-fire ecological, social and political crises of the past year, from President Trump coming into power and rolling back environmental protections to violence around the world.
According to the Biennale’s trio of founders, this multipronged crisis reveals the harms of a system that demands never-ending growth. Instead, they explain in their mission statement, “the crisis-ridden present points to a post-growth era” in which “ecological balance is reconciled with economic development and prosperity.” Getting there, they say, is “a shared design task.”
Hence, various Biennale offerings feature workshops and talks that encourage discussions about sustainable solutions. These include a climate summit and spaces that have been reimagined, including a gas station revamped into a community center.
“The Klima Biennale is trying to give people a sense that we can only do this together,” Pathirana said in a video interview. “Collective energy is more powerful than people think.”
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