Christiana Perschon
Christiana Perschon, Vienna, 23 September 2024
“It’s about trust in the imaginary.”
Spending Time – Holding Space: it was during the autumn of 2024 at her first solo exhibition in Vienna, which has since gone on to be presented in Ottawa, that the artist and filmmaker Christiana Perschon made herself available for this conversation. She speaks here about the contemporary art and art historiography “counter-archive” on which she’s been working for several years, preferentially with an older generation of protagonists: women artists who had to fight even harder against patriarchal structures. As early as her documentary essay entitled Sie ist der andere Blick [She is the Other Gaze], Perschon began pursuing a strategy of “performative collaboration” (there, with figures including Renate Bertlmann and Linda Christanell) geared to the creation of portraits showing “invisible stories and underrepresented bodies.” In this long-running series, a ride in a flat-bottomed boat on the Mondsee with Inge Dick coexists alongside a “cigarette break” with Friedl vom Gröller. Perschon describes the trust-building that’s needed in order to arrive at an artistically productive intergenerational exchange of experience.
“It’s about trust in the imaginary.”
Spending Time – Holding Space: it was during the autumn of 2024 at her first solo exhibition in Vienna, which has since gone on to be presented in Ottawa, that the artist and filmmaker Christiana Perschon made herself available for this conversation. She speaks here about the contemporary art and art historiography “counter-archive” on which she’s been working for several years, preferentially with an older generation of protagonists: women artists who had to fight even harder against patriarchal structures. As early as her documentary essay entitled Sie ist der andere Blick [She is the Other Gaze], Perschon began pursuing a strategy of “performative collaboration” (there, with figures including Renate Bertlmann and Linda Christanell) geared to the creation of portraits showing “invisible stories and underrepresented bodies.” In this long-running series, a ride in a flat-bottomed boat on the Mondsee with Inge Dick coexists alongside a “cigarette break” with Friedl vom Gröller. Perschon describes the trust-building that’s needed in order to arrive at an artistically productive intergenerational exchange of experience.