Artistic-curatorial Research


Preliminary Remark by Lisa Stuckey

As an artistic-curatorial researcher, I work with time-based media, theory as material and the exhibition as medium. The long-term investigations follow a conceptual and poetological approach.

My early video projects, such as Peut-être que j‘avais juste pas assez respire and (she) picture(s) porn: a fictional rehearsal — developed in collaborative processes with Anna Königshofer — focused on methods of the performative reenactment.

In Unclouded Blueness and Four Siblings I engaged with my grandmother‘s 8mm and Super8 film archive in order to question the genre of amateur film autobiographically and with regard to migration, oral history and (traumatic) memorial processes. Through re-editings of the found-footage a detective disclosure let the video-montages function as a filmic family constellation, both universal and particular in nature — the project got published in the Journal for Artistic Research.

For You’ve Seen Me Before, a collaboration between mumok kino and the Academy’s Class for Art and Media, I developed Europe: In third person, a cinematic poem of urban architectures. In the context of the same screening series, I also created ANTI PREDATOR ADAPTATION (together with Jessyca R. Hauser). The research process for the short film included an intensive reading of the quasi lexicon The Language of Psycho-Analysis by J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis from 1967/1973; by incorporating filmic techniques of transference, a philosophical and media-reflexive essay with reference to Andrea Fraser’s institutional critique was finally produced. The short film was i. a. shown at mumok kino, the Diagonale and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, where it received a special mention.

Then I expanded my practice from the two-dimensional video screen to the three-dimensional space in curatorial engagements. The moving image was the focus of the exhibition Prisoners of Venus (curated in collaboration with Anna Schachinger). The white cube was delimited and transformed also in the critically acclaimed research-based exhibition Posthuman Complicities (curated in collaboration with Andrea Popelka). The supporting program, including I hear the waters’ song in mumok cinema, put focus on a sensitive conveying of a repressed history of slavery.

Fama Facing Trial: Words As Currency tied these different interests closely together. The past years of researching the intertwinings of artistic and legal systems, resulted in a media installation that poetically dealt with the materiality of language and a history of the architectures of jurisdiction. Therefore, the cinema and the courtroom were put in dialogue through shot-reverse-shots. The installation relied upon typography, text- and image montage, drawing, sound design and a site-specific transfer of negotiating structures to the exhibition space, critically addressing formats of the aesthetic and judicial judgment.

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Lately, my interest in poetic and narrative aspects of postmodern and critical theories and configurations of contemporaneity has become even more pronounced. Therefore, my current focus lies on text production and the development of figures of thought. I am interested in theory as material and (post-)conceptual arts that challenge knowledge systems through poetic (dis-)articulations.