Raffaela Bielesch was awarded the Theodor Körner Prize 2022 for her project Ablenkungsmanöver. The work combines various stories from her home village of Stripfing in eastern Lower Austria, set in or around the Second World War. Discarded chaff (radar-disrupting tin foil strips) as Christmas tree decorations, a family secret and a dead man on the last day of the war: various narrative strands combine to form a dense fabric that does not result in a unified narrative. Instead, the artist attempts to show how exceptional situations and conflicts - both social and private - find expression in comparatively inconspicuous everyday situations. They crystallise in places and objects with memorable value that keep these tensions present, but also conceal them through their everyday ‘harmlessness’ - like a clever diversionary manoeuvre.

Through a complex fusion of the photographic and the performative, the artist succeeds in finding an artistic expression for the questions that move her that goes beyond pure documentation: Which artefacts remain? How are they used? And what does the specific handling of the object reveal about the unspoken, sometimes forgotten stories behind it? This year's Vienna Art Week, which has the motto ‘Facing Time’, is therefore the ideal setting for the realisation of the project, which subtly explores personal and collective ways of coming to terms with history. Curator Stephanie Damianitsch adds a psychoanalytical perspective to the artistic project.

Artist talk: Raffaela Bielesch in conversation with Georg Hoffmann and Stephanie Damianitsch. Monday, 11 November 2024, 6 pm

The talk takes place on the occasion of the presentation of the project Ablenkungsmanöver at the Museum of Military History. The artist Raffaela Bielesch and Director Georg Hoffmann will discuss different forms of coming to terms with history. To what extent does contemporary art have the potential to capture collective experiences of the past, but also to renegotiate them and set them ‘in motion’ from the point of view of the present? How is history preserved in a museum, but perhaps also rewritten? Curator Stephanie Damianitsch will moderate the discussion and contribute her perspective, which is characterised by psychoanalytical art studies.

Performance lecture. Friday, 15.11.2024, 3 pm

In Raffaela Bielesch's art, the photographic and the performative are always directly related and allow the artist to explore our affective attachment to the world of things that surrounds us. In her performance lecture, on the occasion of the presentation of her work Ablenkungsmanöver, she poses the question of what the specific handling of objects reveals about unspoken, partially forgotten history(ies). To what extent do everyday objects and photographs function equally as recording media? She makes it clear that we can only ‘remember’ feelings, experiences and events by making them objects.

(Curated by Stephanie Damianitsch. With the kind support of the Theodor Körner Fund)