SALOON Vienna hosted a screening of Technofetishism, DissemiNation,
and SuperNova by artist Rah Eleh at Kunsthalle Vienna, followed by a conversation with
curator and historian Dr. Julia Hartmann. Together, the films open up a critical and layered exploration of speculative practices and their entanglement with nationalism,
futurism, and techno-utopian thought.
Rah Eleh’s work engages with the ways speculative narratives can reinforce ethnic nationalism while simultaneously questioning their promises of technological progress. Technofetishism brings these tensions into focus through discursive and relational encounters with leading voices in contemporary futurism, including Ytasha Womack, Catherine Ramírez, and Boddhisattva Chattopadhyay. DissemiNation turns to archival and textual material to examine how the idea of the nation is constructed, placing romanticized narratives alongside exclusionary and ultraconservative rhetoric. With SuperNova, Rah Eleh draws on queer and camp aesthetics to address gaps within the genre and proposes Xenofuturist principles of pluriversality, unworlding, and unbelonging as possible ways forward.