Christiana Perschon

Friedl vom Gröller doesn’t give Christiana Perschon an interview. She gives her more: the film of a brief encounter, which in its ephemeral playfulness, precisely captures the artistic program of those portrayed. An intergenerational dialogue as affectionate togetherness.

Double 8 focuses on the encounter with Linda Christanell, artist of the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s [...] In the gesture of mutual filming, images are created in the eyes of the others. The gazes into the camera create a visual loop between the two women while at same time pointing at the beholder. These images constitute the two women as self-determined subjects saying: I see you seeing me - instead of being looked at as an object. (Christiana Perschon)

Within the first three minutes, the arrangement of image to sound is made clear: the recorded voice of Lieselott Beschorner (born 1927) will be accompanied by a black screen, while the images of this artist at work in her studio will be rendered in silent black-and-white. Christiana Perschon continues her creative documentation of female artists (as in SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE, 2018), with a sensitivity to gesture, texture, rhythm, materials. “The line unfolds into something particular,” remarks Beschorner, and the same applies to the film’s capturing and assembling of light, movement, and sound.

As artists grow old and fragile, they face the prospect of no longer being able to perform the gestures of creation. The first shot of BILDWERDEN frames the Austrian artist Isolde Maria Joham, now 90, off-center, her hands shaking. Christiana Perschon (SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE) allows her a new gesture: to climb a stair frame and pose, smiling in front of her large canvases. Isolde trembles a little, but so does the bird we see alighting on a branch, as do the stairs themselves; nothing in this world is fixed rigid. As the filmmaker says to Isolde, happily: “Now you’ve outgrown the frame”.

To make an object based on a photograph means adding dimensions such as space, time and continuity. Roasting skewers, hairpins and nails were the tools of self-liberation in the photo series Zerstörung einer Illusion ("Destruction of an Illusion") by Karin Mack, which was produced in 1977 with a self-timer and her hand processing work in the darkroom. Forty years after its creation, it is a new perspective that transforms and sets into motion the examination of the self-image and role as a woman into a three-dimensional object. Light and rotation create an illusory horizon of perception inherent in filmmaking and make the living shadows dance in the delirium of the real. (C. P.)

Mother-child pairs occupy the image space and film time – for as long as is needed to change diapers.

Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. She is the other gaze is a collaboration with five female visual artists of an older generation who have been part of the Viennese art scene since the 1970s and engaged in the women's movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell, Lore Heuermann, Karin Mack and Margot Pilz share their early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers, the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and the self-understanding of younger artists today. With their voices and narratives, they become collaborators passing on feminist thinking and artistic experiences.