Talks

Is this Mermaid Naked ?@Raw Matters Dec 2024

Photo: Barbara Mair

Mermaid talk

In a 15 minute performative paper I presented from a mermaid’s perspective, a hybrid between human and fish, the current challenges of crossing the English Channel from the UK. The mermaid in Western contexts is often associated with the gender construct of femininity and considered a mythical ‘creature’, aimed at stimulating male fantasies. By crossing species and waters, I used the mermaid’s seductive quality to critically examine the cross overs between feminism(s), xenophobia and global warming, in which the water becomes the connecting instead of the separating element. In a combination of storytelling and academic talk, I interrogated an assumption of what it means to feel ‘home’, between water, land, EU, UK and how the changing temperature of the Channel water affects this ‘feeling’.
Being a white European living in the UK, after Brexit, complicated this perspective further.

TAP talks

I perform a variety of academic talks, containing speculative science fiction elements. Some of these talks I framed as TAP talks (Technology Art Performance), borrowing from the famous TED talk format. Each talk presented a new form of AI offering a replacement to human tasks such as giving birth, finding love and thinking creatively. At the Feminist Futures symposium in July 2017 held at Central Saint Martin’s London, I presented a form of Artificial Intelligence called MONA, the Multiple Online Navigation Application. The audience was mainly art students and MONA’s function was to overcome the gender bias in the art market by thinking and producing creatively instead of artists. MONA’s visual was a collage between Mona Lisa’s smile and my inserted lips. I presented MONA by performing the so-called Turing test with the AI, live in front of the audience.

Watch the full-length talk “Meet MONA”, recorded @Feminist Futures seminar, Central Saint Martins, July 2017

The Burned Phallus @ Freud Museum

A Freudian analysis of women, cigarettes and contemporary re-emasculation

Building upon the premise that the cigarette became a signifier for emancipation for American women in the 1920s, in this academic talk, I used Freud’s theory of Penis envy (German: Penisneid), to explain how this has resulted in the delayed smoking ban in Austria in 2019. In my hypothesis that the cigarette has become a contemporary symbol of re-emasculation, creates an explanatory model for this delay in the context of Austria’s fascist history.

Mars Interview

Mars Interview 2019 was specifically produced for the Women on the Moon exhibition, a feminist investigation of new space age which I co-curated and co-organised with my colleague Laima Kreivytė. It was launched in Klaipeda’s Cultural Communication Centre, a town close to the Russian border in Lithuania, in September 2019. The exhibition was timed with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. In June 2019, NASA announced their intention to send the first woman to the moon by 2024. In the meantime the focus from white male dominated NASA and privately owned space travel companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX has shifted from the Moon to ‘conquering’ Mars. And while I was doing research on the moon landing on the internet, rather than facts, I predominantly encountered conspiracy theories claiming up until today, that the moon landing never happened and that it was filmed in a studio. In Mars Interview 2019 I stage my landing onto Mars’ surface for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in July 2019, filmed in my living room.

G(j)estekunstner Talk

This talk played with the Norwegian word for performance artist (Gestekunstner) and the word guest (Gjest) in its title. In it I was presenting my experience during my residency at AIR Bergen in Norway. It was part of an organised community performance night held in the public library. The residency at AIR Bergen was hosted in a former sardine factory with a view on the Fjord. I had a huge studio available just to myself for 4 weeks. Within this massive amount of space, I was encountering news items on my laptop on how refugees are housed like sardines in former Berlin airport. While I was discovering Bergen as a city, I came across a suburb called paradis, the Norwegian word for paradise. In the talk, I was combining all these different narrative strands into one. This included the fact that in my home country Austria, where immigration numbers got more and more restricted, a popular tourist location among wealthier Arabs is a place called Zell am See. It is rumoured to be so popular due to its resonance with the description of paradise in the Koran.

The Art of Investment

The Art of Investment was an invited performance and part of the group exhibition Kunst& Kapital which took place at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 2012. In the performance, which was framed as a consulting event, I gave the audience a tour through the exhibition while analysing the potential market value of the works exhibited in it. The event was split into two parts; first the audience enjoyed a professional presentation explaining the reasons for contemporary art investment where I used terms like risk & return, high-end investment & diversification strategy frequently. The second part of the event was the actual analysis of the value of artists and their works. It consisted of 3 factors: first the size of the painting, second the percentage of each base colour in the painting and finally, details about the artists him/herself. In particular, zodiac sign, age and sex were of major interest within the evaluation.