Elfriede Jelinek

Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano teacher living with her domineering mother, meets a young man who starts romantically pursuing her.

The Blood Countess and her maid embark on a quest for the red elixir of life and a book that threatens the vampire realm. Hot on their heels are a police inspector, two vampirologists, a vegetarian nephew and his therapist.

An unusual story of a triangular relationship in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls under his spell. It will be her last great passion. Her feelings are so strong and all-encompassing that Ivan can neither understand nor return them.

"This video film shows indecency in its modern form. While peddling naked female flesh was considered indecent in the past, we can see by the examples of today´s star athletes that skin full of advertising sells better. The same applies to politicians, of course, though in a more subtle way. Advertising on skin as the new indecency! I consider this film to be a continuation of my previous work with the body as a vehicle for social codes. While in the past it was religion that dictated male and female behaviour, which was also expressed in their physical appearance, business has now assumed this role. Business dictates physical behaviour, physical pressure in its most direct form, and even sets standards for how our bodies are to be represented. Religion no longer prescribes morality, that is now done by the global power of business, with its products and codes. Morality has found a new patron." (Valie Export)

Although hostess Brigitte and life-loving schoolgirl Paula only meet in person once, their fates and lives are closely intertwined.

Tourism is booming at the Pension Alpenrose. After a dying in an accident, Karin returns as one of the undead. In a cinema owned by a Nazi widow where the past is mourned, she brings the dead back to life.

She is the godmother of performance art. With her shocking public actions she created in the late 60s images that have burned into the general visual memory until today. The life and work of the Austrian artist Valie Export exemplify a development in art history in which women sought and found new ways and means of expression. Her work provides a feminist counterpart to the Viennese actionism of her time, which has influenced numerous artists of subsequent generations. The innovative diversity of her artistic approaches makes Valie Export an icon of 20th century art history.

Die Ausgesperrten revolves around an unlikely group of 4 youths in Vienna who band together, each for different reasons, to mug people. Two are fraternal twins, the third a blue-collar worker, the fourth the privileged daughter of wealthy parents who "needs a little dirt in her life". The story provides penetrating insights into the Austria of the 50s, in which some enjoyed the benefits of the "Economic Miracle", while others were shut out. It repeatedly references Austria's Nazi past and the numerous ways in which it influences the present despite the conspiracy of silence which surrounds it.

Two women communicate in a language of art, working men in a pub speak in their Viennese idiom, patients of a psychiatric hospital arrive at speech through improvisation – all these diverging portrayals do not merge into one another but communicate by their proximity.

“Writer Elfriede Jelinek has repeatedly made statements about her television-watching habits. She watches a great deal, a wide variety of what is broadcast, though rarely for pleasure or the purpose of gaining knowledge. On the contrary, the TV program is one of her favorite objects of study. Three separate times on a particular day, while sitting in a comfy TV chair, she commented on Austrian TV news for VALIE EXPORT.” – Brigitta Burger-Utzer

Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Lecture. Pre-recorded, and shown on video on 7 December 2004, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

Two particles wander through space. Two particles? Perhaps they are also two musicians: the first and second violins. An absurd scenario. Voices A and B speak to each other, but they can't hear each other ... Without the words Fukushima or nuclear power being mentioned even once, “Kein Licht. (2011/2012/2017)” depicts a ghostly world after the nuclear disaster. The text by Elfriede Jelinek becomes the libretto of a world premiere musical performance at the Ruhrtriennale. Frenchman Philippe Manoury is composing a new musical theater work for actors, singers and a musical ensemble. The special feature: The music itself also becomes an uncontrollable element. Together with director Nicolas Stemann, Manoury is developing a new form in which pre-composed orchestral and electronic score modules are combined with live electronics that intervene in the modulation of the singers and actors - in real time. Music is verbalized and language is musicalized.