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Premiere of the Kontakt Video Portraits (2022)

Admiral Kino, Vienna 2022, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Anna Jermolaewa in Vienna in June 2020
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Ashley Hans Scheirl in Vienna in June 20 ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW  ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik in Vienna in October 2 ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with curator Silvia Eiblmayr in Vienna in February 2 ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with writer Clemens Setz in Vienna in February 2021
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Werner Würtinger in Vienna in July 2021
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Josef Dabernig in Vienna in September 20 ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Sanja Iveković in Zagrbe in November 202 ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Goran Trbuljak in Zagreb in November 202 ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with dramaturg, founding member, and member of BADco ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with musician and cultural manager Edek Bartz in Vie ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with writer and essayist Franz Schuh in Vienna in Ma ...
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with artist Katrina Daschner in Vienna in May 2022
Film still from the Kontakt Video Portrait with filmmaker, co-founder and longtime co-director  ...
Admiral Kino, Vienna 2022, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
Admiral Kino, Vienna 2022, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
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Since 2020, the publicist and dramaturge Claus Philipp and the artist Manuel Gorkiewicz have been working in response to a commission by the Kontakt Collection to conduct and film conversations with Central and Eastern European artists and intellectuals who have contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the artistic and social milieus, realities, and developments in this geographic and cultural sphere.

The first 15 Kontakt Video Portraits were presented to the public at the Viennese cinema Admiral Kino on 9 June 2022.

The Kontakt Collection and its research activities focus on Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European artistic output that has accompanied the social and political developments of the past several decades and has been contributing important neo-avantgarde works to the history of art since the late 1950s. Numerous artists, curators, and theoreticians became contemporary witnesses to the processes of transformation associated with the key years of 1968 and 1989, processes that also fundamentally changed art.

The Kontakt Video Portraits shed light on these influences and the ways in which they have affected artistic, literary, and theoretical work, thereby continuing the tradition established by other art historically significant Austrian projects such as the “portraits of artists” curated by Peter Kogler for “museum in progress,” with its impressive panorama of international artistic perspectives from the 1990s, and Wilhelm Gaube’s oeuvre of around 250 artist portraits from the 1960s and 1970s.

So far, interviews have been conducted with the following individuals: Edek Bartz, Josef Dabernig, Katrina Daschner, Silvia Eiblmayr, Sanja Iveković, Anna Jermolaewa, Peter Kubelka, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Franz Schuh, Clemens Setz, Goran Trbuljak, What, How & for Whom/WHW, Werner Würtinger, and Želimir Žilnik. This series is to be expanded by new contributions on a continual basis.