Artist Talk with Gisèle Vienne and Florentina Holzinger

The artists Gisèle Vienne and Florentina Holzinger talk to Kerstin Stakemeier, Professor of Art Theory and Mediation, about their work.

This talk is part of a collaboration between the Haus am Waldsee, the Georg Kolbe Museum and Sophiensæle. All three institutions bring Vienne’s work, in all its complexity, to the city as part of Berlin Art Week 2024 and present different approaches to her multifaceted practice, located between photography, sculpture and installation, film, choreography, and theatre. The film Jerk by Gisèle Vienne will be shown at Sophiensæle on 15 September 2024 and the performances of Crowd on 14/15/16 November 2024. Haus am Waldsee opens This Causes Consciousness to Fracture on 11 September 2024 (the exhibition runs from 12 September 2024 to 12 January 2025). At Georg Kolbe Museum the exhibition Ich weiß, daß ich mich verdoppeln kann, presenting Viennes work in the context of female avantgarde artists, opens on 12 September 2024 (the exhibition runs from 13 September 2024 to 9 March 2025).

Gisèle Vienne reconsiders our perceptual frameworks and invents artistic languages in order to pave the way for structural societal change. Vienne’s creations, both on stage and within her visual practice, are developed together with dancers and actors, and are often animated by anthropomorphic figures and puppets to explore the sensuality, rage, and creativity of counterculture in all its subversive potential. Through bringing together her philosophical influences and formal experiences, her work on stage and otherwise seeks to overturn dominant orders and to invent new artistic forms that explore the possibility of encoding the world differently.

Florentina Holzinger’s dance performances are driven by the idea of identity, sexual and physical strengt. Inspired by Viennese Actionism, body art and bodybuilding, as well as also by classical ballet, cabaret and circus, she deconstructs hegemonic images of femininity in her shows. This is also reflected in the diverse cast of her company, which brings together performers of different identities, generations and abilities. In addition to performers with dance training, she is joined on stage by stunt women, sex workers, piercers and martial arts artists.

Kerstin Stakemeier is Professor of Art Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and has been teaching since the early 2000s in the fields of political, art, cultural, and media theory as well as in art history (among others, Freie Universität Berlin, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Universität der Künste Berlin, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg). A continuous focus of her teaching is the question of artistic and political practice, its material, its subjects, its scope, its limits - historical as well as contemporary.

Next date:

• Date Sunday, 15/September/2024 15:30
• Venue Sophiensaele - Festsaal
• Address Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin-Mitte