The Austrian Pavilion will remain closed during the 20th Architecture Biennale and is available for rent.

The Austrian Pavilion is being presented as a vacant property and can be viewed on selected dates. For the duration of the exhibition, an estate agent’s office will be set up where visitors interested in the property can submit a rental offer and rent the building for €1,000,000 per day. A 20x3m LED wall, in-stalled in front of the entrance to the Austrian Pavilion, serves as an oversized sales poster and a space for public discourse. Building on the language of property marketing, the animated text panels alternate with critical, poetic and data-driven elements. The visual concept is based on the strategic appropriation and recoding of the corporate identities and graphic language of property companies.

As an immersive exhibition experience, FOR RENT makes exclusion a physical sensation. Those who are excluded become observers of that exclusion – and thus part of the performance. Exclusion becomes a productive aesthetic strategy. The shift of access to the outdoor space of the Giardini and into the digital realm – via the LED wall in front of the pavilion, the catalogue, the website and circulating artefacts sold as editions from a vending machine – creates a decentralised form of public sphere. The pavilion remains closed, the discourse permanently accessible.

At the same time, FOR RENT follows the guiding principle of curatorial hybridity: the exhibition, publica-tion and public discourse are intended to be equally important components of a comprehensive narra-tive. The catalogue’s design language functions as a journalistic display that mediates between the book and the exhibition. International and national authors and practitioners from the fields of architecture, theory and artistic practice are invited to discuss, through their contributions, questions of availability, capitalisation and the political economy of space.

FOR RENT deliberately avoids didactic forms of communication and transforms vacant spaces into an immersive experience: we aim to explore the availability of space, economic exclusion and public negoti-ation processes through the performative moment. In this way, FOR RENT addresses the emotional di-mension of exclusion, inaccessibility and spatial alienation, and invites us to rethink the concept of archi-tecture: moving away from a purely technical-functional and property-market perspective towards an openness that brings artistic-critical positions and reflections back into focus.