FREDA FIALA
Cultural researcher working on Taiwan, institutional histories, museum studies and Asia-Pacific–Europe entanglements.
Research Projects Publications Talks
Warm welcome to my page. I am a cultural researcher exploring relations between Central Europe and the Asia-Pacific. My work moves between transregional cultural exchange, informal cultural diplomacy, and critical heritage and museum studies. I engage with cultural and museological infrastructures and attend to how transmodern circuits shape identity, display, and heritage across artistic, institutional, and diplomatic registers.
Rooted in my upbringing, this pathway found its first expression during my time on Aotearoa/New Zealand’s North Island while I was still in high school, where I attended a school with a predominantly Māori student community. This experience gradually led me to reflect on how historical narratives are produced and circulated, and how they have often been written in ways that foreground certain actors and perspectives while leaving others largely unacknowledged. It fostered an early interest in the processes through which histories are assembled, whose voices are preserved within them, and how alternative perspectives might be recovered or made legible.
I then decided to study Theatre and Performance Studies in Vienna – a field that appealed to me for its wide-angled cultural studies perspective – alongside Chinese Studies. During my BA, I spent an exchange semester in Berlin at Freie Universität, followed by years of extended language study during my Sinology degree, in both Hong Kong, at the Chinese University, and Taiwan, at National Taiwan University. These periods of sustained encounter sharpened my attention to the ways in which institutions and curatorial practices sense and mediate histories, how they gather and address publics, and how cultural politics take form through both material and intangible means.
Supported by a DOC grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), I conducted my PhD research on Taiwan’s informal cultural diplomacy with a focus on the infrastructure of its performing arts. My research on trans-Pacific cultural exchanges during this period was further supported by the EU-Japan Fest Office, the Goethe-Institut, and Literar-Mechana, among others. My doctoral work received multiple awards, including the Young Scholar Award of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) and the inaugural DOC School Award of the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies in 2025.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working as part of the interdisciplinary ERC project OLFAC (Olfactormativity: Exploring the Intervening Performativity of Smell) in Austria. Alongside my focus on the effects of transregional cultural circulation, I maintain a strong interest in the relationship between the body and the (museum) archive – a line of inquiry that OLFAC allows me to expand further.
At present, I am working primarily on exhibition histories and the cultural relations that shaped them. This includes research on exhibition exchanges between the People’s Republic of China and Austria during the Cold War, as well as on memories of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, with particular attention to the historical role of camphor and its entanglements with global trade, industry, and colonial governance. In collaboration with colleagues from Aotearoa/New Zealand, I am also preparing a critical reworking of the legacy of the Austrian natural scientist, colonial collector, and museum worker Andreas Reischek, whose activities in the late nineteenth century intersected with the looting of Māori ancestral remains and cultural treasures. This work traces the evolving ways in which his actions have been remembered, reassessed, and debated in both Aotearoa and Austria, and engages with ongoing conversations around provenance research, restitution, and the responsibilities of museums and researchers today.
Current Work
Taiwan and Cultural Infrastructures
Arts institutions and trans-regional networks for informal diplomacy.
Histories of Extraction
Camphor and Indigenous perspectives in heritage practice.
Postcolonial Museology
Collections, restitution, museum ethics and repatriation.
In November 2024, I joined the EU-funded (ERC) research project OLFAC, an interdisciplinary venture dedicated to exploring the intervening performativity of smell at the intersection of arts and politics.
Led by Prof. Silke Felber (PI), our team is based at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Arts Linz.
Within OLFAC, my work bridges sensory research with questions of cultural heritage, museum practice, and transregional cultural relations, particularly between Central Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
More about the project can be found here.
Publications
Co-authored chapter
Austria–Taiwan relations:
Functional ties and cultural futures
with Alfred Gerstl.
In Partners in need, partners indeed? Tracking Europe–Taiwan relations amidst global disruption, published by the CEIAS Central European Institute of Asian Studies, ed. by Matej Šimalčík, Kristina Kironska, and Alfred Gerstl (2025).
This study offers an unusually comprehensive mapping of Taiwan’s relations , all 27 EU member states, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK. My contribution foregrounds cultural relations, artistic exchange, and knowledge infrastructures as key sites of informal diplomacy.
Recent Publications
Edited Volume
The Non-fungible Body? Performance and Digitalisation
edited with River Lin (林人中) and Alfred Weidinger (Berlin: DISTANZ, 2023).
This book engages the question of the body’s non-exchangeability within systems of digital circulation – the volume explores how performance relates to archival and museological frameworks. If museums have traditionally relied on objects as stable carriers of memory and value, performance poses a different challenge: its knowledge resides in embodied practice, ephemeral encounters, and forms of transmission that often resist conventional documentation. Texts by Geraldine Juárez, Bruce Quek, Rose Lejeune, River Lin and myself examine what kinds of everyday documentation of body-based practices can exist at all, how such forms are being reshaped through processes of digitisation, and whether emerging technological infrastructures might open new pathways. Particular attention is given to the implications of algorithmic systems, distributed ledgers, and blockchain-based technologies, which raise new questions about presence, authorship, ownership, and the circulation of performative knowledge.
Journal article
Curated Relations: East Asian Collaborative Models in Contemporary Performance
In on-curating Issue 61 "Collective Curating in Performing Arts", ed. by Sigrid Gareis, Nicole Haitzinger, Gwendolin Lehnerer, and River Lin (2025).
Focusing on collaborative curatorial models in Asia-Pacific contexts, this article argues that collectively organised practices function as aspirational infrastructures that foster horizontal networking, intra-regional epistemologies, and more attuned forms of mutual engagement across intersecting institutional and cultural contexts.
Upcoming Book
I am currently working on my first English-language monograph, which will be published by Brill in 2026. The publication is supported by an Open Access grant from the FWF Austrian Science Fund.
Building on my doctoral research, the book examines the institutional, curatorial, and geopolitical dynamics surrounding Taiwan’s new generation of Performing Arts Centers, in particular the Taipei Performing Arts Center (臺北表演藝術中心, TPAC). At its core are questions of cultural sovereignty, regional networking, and artistic knowledge production, examined through public cultural infrastructures and transnational co-production models. Rather than approaching theatres simply as venues for artistic presentation, the study considers Taiwan’s performing arts centres as complex institutional ecosystems – spaces where cultural policy, curatorial practice, architecture, and artistic experimentation continually intersect.
Particular attention is given to the ways in which festivals, platforms, and collaborative development processes – from the Taipei Arts Festival to initiatives such as ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance) – have functioned as sites where regional connections are negotiated and new artistic vocabularies emerge. In this sense, the book considers how curators, artists, and institutions experiment with the circulation and exchange of knowledge across East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
These developments are set against a longer historical backdrop. Taiwan’s cultural institutions – museums and theatres alike – were profoundly shaped by the infrastructural frameworks introduced during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), when modern exhibitionary and theatrical architectures were first established on the island. Tracing the continuities and transformations of these infrastructures into the present, the study asks how they have been reinterpreted and expanded in response to Taiwan’s evolving democratic society, its complex geopolitical position, and its efforts to articulate a distinct cultural voice internationally.
Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), © FF 2025
Ueno Panoramakan Tokyo, c. 1910.
Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō 臺灣日日新報 (10 October 1908).
Talks and Conference Participations
2026–2024
Lecture Series “The Senses in Performance.” Together with Silke Felber and Julia Ostwald, OLFAC/Kunstuniversität Linz, March–June 2026.
Panel chair, “Remembering, Collecting, Exhibiting.” The Orient of the Habsburg Monarchy: Actors, Entanglements, Interactions conference, Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Vienna, 28–30 January 2026.
“Camphor’s Crossings: Extractive Histories and Memory Cultures.” OLFAC – Sensing across the Humanities, Sciences, and Arts symposium, ifk International Research Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna, 4 December 2025.
“Entangled Worlds: Customs, Collections, and the Routes of Chinese Display in 19th-Century Central Europe.” Museum in Motion: New Frontiers in Chinese Museum Studies, University of Siena (Arezzo Campus), 14 November 2025.
Panel discussion host: “Giving, Taking, Returning, Reclaiming: Entanglements of Becoming in the Future Museum,” with Claudia Banz, Matthias Beitl, Pia Schölnberger and Vanessa Spanbauer. Ambivalent Orders – Symposium of the Austrian Association of Curators, MuseumsQuartier Wien, 15 November 2025.
“Smells Like Belonging: Fictional Genealogies of the South in Contemporary Taiwanese Performance.” A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art and Its Global Connections, University of Edinburgh, 4 November 2025.
“Entangled Worlds and the Logistics of Qing Chinese Display in the 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung.”Habsburg Central Europe in Global History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, 25 October 2025.
“Translocal Performative Academy,” with Claudia Bosse and Yola Yulfianti. Galerie Exhibit/Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 18 October 2025.
“Artists as Catalysts: Taiwan's Anti-Nuclear Protests and Environmental Activism.”Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference, University of Maryland, 18 July 2025 (online).
“Empty Stages, Crowded Studios, Networked Bodies: ADAM’s Pacific Perspectives on Contemporary Performance.”European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) conference, Palacký University, Olomouc, 22 June 2025.
“The Sensing Fold: Artistic Research in Asia-Pacific Performance Ecologies.”Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network (APARN) conference, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 1 June 2025.
Panel chair: “Bodies in Action – Gesture and the Interruption of Violence.” University of Vienna, 16 May 2025.
“A Geosensoric Binge: Performing ‘Asia’ as Olfactory Method.”International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR)conference, University of Cologne, 10 June 2025.
“Curated Identities: Taiwan’s Performing Arts Diplomacy.” Guest lecture, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 12 March 2025.
“Curated Identities: Taiwan’s Performing Arts Diplomacy.” Guest lecture, University of Melbourne, Naarm/Melbourne, 3 March 2025.
“The Curatorial Compass: Cultural Networks in Performance.” Guest lecture, Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), Taipei, 20 February 2025.
“The Taipei Performing Arts Center and the Visceral Economy of ‘Avant-Garde’.” Curatography – The Study of Curatorial Culture, Taipei / online, 18 January 2025.
“Curated Identities: Taiwan’s Performing Arts Diplomacy.” Vienna Center for Taiwan Studies (VCTS), 9 April 2025.
Panel discussion: “Die Macht von Duft und Gestank (The Power of Scent and Smell),” with Silke Felber and Julia Ostwald. Kepler Salon, Linz, 24 March 2025.
Panel discussion moderator: “Panel II: Materialities in Question – Production as an Embodied Process.”Performance Besides Itself: Infra- and Parastructures of a Contemporary Liveness, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, 7 December 2024.
Conversation: “Annie Jael Kwan in conversation with Freda Fiala – The Center is the Margin of the Margin.” Performance Besides Itself, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, 7 December 2024.
Panel discussion: “Critics in Residence – Kyoto Experiment Opening Symposium.” Kyoto Art Center and Goethe Institute, Kyoto, 8 October 2024.
Panel discussion: “The Present State of Journalism and Critique: Media in Transition, Uprise of Social Media.” Kyoto Experiment Festival, Kyoto Art Center, 13 October 2024.
Panel moderator: “The Live Panel.” Curatorial Tipping Points, Austrian Association of Curators / Salzburger Kunstverein / Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 27 July 2024.
[…]
Artist Residency Programme
In 2023, I initiated a museum-supported artist residency exchange between the Yingge Ceramics Museum (新北市立鶯歌陶瓷博物館) in New Taipei City and the Academy of Ceramics Gmunden at the Gmundner Keramik Manufaktur in Austria.
The programme marks the first institutional residency collaboration between Taiwan and Austria in the field of ceramics, opening a new channel for artistic exchange between the two regions.
The residency operates through an annual open call jointly issued by both institutions. Each year, two artists working with ceramics are invited to undertake a three-month residency in Yingge and Gmunden respectively, offering time and space to develop their practice while engaging with the distinct material traditions, workshop cultures, and artistic communities of both locations.
Learn more about the Yingge–Gmunden ceramics exchange here.
Media (click images to enlarge)
With Siku Yaway (林瑋茜), Commissioner of the Indigenous Peoples Department, Wulai Atayal Museum, Taiwan, 2025.
Young Scholars Award of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, June 2025.
OLFAC public talk at the Kepler Salon Linz, with Cornelia Lehner, Gitti Vasicek, Julia Ostwald, Freda Fiala, Silke Felber, Antonia Karácsonyi, Iris Mayr (from left), April 2025.
Inaugural DOC School Award of the University of Vienna’s Faculty
of Philological and Cultural Studies, December 2025.
Camphor histories,
fieldwork in Taiwan,
2025.