A Viennese visual artist and writer with a home in Berlin, Ariane Müller is one of the coeditors of the Berlin-based art magazine Starship, which first came out in 1998 and operates as a platform for production. Even earlier, Müller, together with Linda Bilda, edited the magazine Artfan out of Vienna. Like Starship later on, Artfan also materialized as a space, the Artclub in Vienna.

For twenty-five years, the artist led an institute for urban development and political consulting under the aegis of the United Nations program UN-HABITAT. She shared what she experienced doing this work, for which she was almost constantly on the road, with the public in her novel Handbuch für die Reise durch Afrika, published in 2013, and an exhibition held that year at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel.

As curator of the exhibition Dispossession at the Künstlerhaus Wien in 2021–22, she recently oversaw a critical reappraisal of the institution’s Nazi history and the mechanisms of exclusion in the art world more generally.

Müller primarily works in the media of drawing and text. Painting and the use of time-based media, to her mind, are extensions of this graphical approach to art as a kind of record. The question of why a particular creative medium was chosen in the first place is as important to her as the narrative that emerges in it.

Dealing with war has been central to Müller's work since the early 1990s. In 1992, after a stay in Zagreb during the war in Yugoslavia, she produced a special issue of Artfan that worked with the means of photo-romance. In the work Society has to be defended, shown at Dunckers Kulturhaus in Helsingfors in 2007, the probability of the meaningfulness of a purely textual confrontation with the war is linked with the female painting-historical categorisation of the interior and reading. For the exhibition at the Secession, both an image and a counter-image are to emerge from this theme, following on from the sentence ‘Here too, thou shalt not kill’, which Hannah Arendt gave in response to a question that initially seemed to compromise her position.