Isa Rosenberger

In collaboration with CELIA MILLAN

In 2022, Isa Rosenberger was invited to the Bauhaus Dessau as an artist-in-residence with the assignment to produce a new work for the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz, and later at the Bauhaus itself. The starting point for MANDA was the appearance of two women at the Bauhaus in 1928: the dancer and choreographer Manda von Kreibig, who developed the Stäbetanz (Stick Dance) at the Bauhaus with Oskar Schlemmer; and the writer and women’s rights activist Lu Märten (Die Künstlerin, 1919). As early as 1914, Märten encouraged women to be aware of the social obstacles to their artistic activities and to act in a self-determined way. In MANDA, Rosenberger explores history as it is broken off, not passed on, and also considers life lines that are cut off and taken up again somewhere else. She carried out in-depth research in museum archives and publications and primarily at the museum depot of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. Working with the dancer and choreographer Celia Millan, in MANDA she both reviews biographical information and revives the experimental atmosphere of the historical Bauhaus. The depot itself becomes the stage for an exploration through film and dance of two forgotten cultural workers and of an incomplete historiography. Rosenberger interweaves her historical research with general and current questions about the memory of museums and their responsibility in this very process of writing history.

Statements filmed on the historical Bauhaus stage in Dessau by Regina Bittner, cultural theorist, curator and director of the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and Barbara Steiner, art historian, curator and director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, accompany the installation.

The title MANDA not only refers to Manda von Kreibig but also means legacy, bequest or promise in Spanish. This is an indication that for Rosenberger, dealing with the past is always also a social mission from the deceased to the living.

Barbara Steiner, Alexandra Trost

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MANDA
2023
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Video 1: MANDA
In collaboration with Celia Millan
Full-HD-Video I 15 min I German with English subtitles
Choreography, dance: Celia Millan
Camera and sound: Reinhard Mayr
Lighting: Tino Ahlmann
Cello: Elisabet Iserte López
Technical support: Anna Holtz
Support: Mandy Berner, Gunnar Wolf
Voice: Martina Zinner
Organisation: Tuan Do Duc, Christin Irrgang
Concept, Script and editing: Isa Rosenberger
Advisors: Torsten Blume, Rüdiger Messerschmidt, Sylvia Ziegner ……………………………………………………………………………………
Video 2: Interviews with Regina Bittner and Barbara Steiner on the historical Bauhaus Dessau stage
Full-HD-Video I 19 min I German with English subtitles
Camera and Sound: Ute König, Domenik Pasemann, Marcus Wozny Editing: Isa Rosenberger ……………………………………………………………………………………
Display: Rainer Stadlbauer I studio itzo
……………………………………………………………………………………
Made possible by
Kunsthaus Graz
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation ……………………………………………………………………………………

Selected Press:

Müller, Christin: Isa Rosenberger: Manda, in: Camera Austria International, Nr. 163/2023, pp. 74–75 I PDF

Rakowitz, Susanne: Rosenberger, Roth, Wiener. Kunsthaus Graz: Perspektivenwechsel für alle! In: Kleine Zeitung, published: 08/02/2023, pp 56–57 I PDF

Behr, Martin: Kunst erhellt die Historie von Frauen. Wie Isa Rosenberger Verdrängtem und Vergessenem Raum gibt. In: Salzburger Nachrichten, published: 08/02/2023, p 9 I PDF

Gucher, Florian: Isa Rosenberger - Schatten, Lücken, Leerstellen, in: artmagazine, published: 03/15/2023 https://www.artmagazine.cc/content123558.html

In collaboration with LOULOU OMER

Behind the boy, however, the night passes silently and spreads the black cloak of forgetfulness over the vast land from which he comes. 
Maxim Gorky, The Music of The Big City

In her artistic practice, Isa Rosenberger turns her gaze again and again toward forgotten (or repressed) histories in order to open up a context for them in the present, and thus also to facilitate alternative readings of history. In the year 1934, at the Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna (today Adult Education Center Ottakring), a dance play by Gertrud Kraus was on show, entitled “Die Stadt wartet” (The City Waits) and based on Maxim Gorki’s fairy tale “Musik der Großstadt” (Music of the Big City). Kraus’s choreography reflected the path of a boy in the big city, as well as his fears and his fascination with life in the metropolis. Gertrud Kraus herself danced the role of this young man. However, as things presently stand, no photograph of this performance exists. Isa Rosenberger’s project is conceived as an attempt to approximate this void and historical gap. Rosenberger collaborates with the artist and dancer Loulou Omer, whose mother Zipora Lerman was a student of Gertrud Kraus in Tel Aviv. The exhibition is oriented to the idea of the “stage” as a performative space that may also be seen as a political and social trouble spot. In a “rendition” of sorts, the various components of the project at Camera Austria are staged with a spatial focus: photographs, videos, archival materials, workshop results, sketches, and performances.

In May 2019, Isa Rosenberger produced a series of photographs which showed the artist and dancer Loulou Omer dancing, singing, and playing the piano, while simultaneously responding to what Omer was performing on the theater stage of the Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna (today the Volkshochschule Ottakring). Not only was the series capturing moments of spontaneous creativity, but whole stages of Rosenberger’s extensive artistic research elided into this performance. These moments revealed the bodily experience communicated as political medium through an interdisciplinary artistic approach, rooted in the methodology of Gertrud Kraus. Kraus was a Vienna-born expressionist modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher1 who directed both a company and a school first in Vienna, and then later in Tel Aviv after having fled the Nazi regime in 1935.2 She founded the Israel Ballet Theatre in 1950–51 and was the first director of the dance department of the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem (today the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance).3 The ways in which the bodily experience and movement were impulsively organized, structured, and performed respond to the possibilities and challenges of existing political, social, cultural, pedagogical, and psychological conditions. In this context, the substantial performance of Omer was at the same time a challenge—as an ode to Kraus and to the legacy and narrative of her personal history; to her venture of reconstructing and bridging identities in new terrains; and to her artistic approach as a form of resistance and as a possibility of expression.

Rosenberger’s work speaks to this legacy by newly contextualizing, challenging, and questioning history vis-à-vis the realities of the present. Her precarious approach enables the recognition of different perspectives and possibilities by also articulating muted, suppressed, lost, and forgotten histories. Her practice—and also her artistic strength—is based on a composite net of personal narratives and historical findings, while creating discursive platforms to articulate urgent social concerns with a feminist slant. Hence, her engagement with social issues coincides with Kraus’s artistic approach. As the writer and scholar Henia Rottenberg puts it, “characterized by a search for self-expression that was associated with deep social consciousness and humanism, her works resulted from her profound personal identification with struggles for social justice.”4

During her research, Rosenberger discovered that, in 1934, the theater stage of the Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna presented Kraus’s dance play “Die Stadt wartet” (The City Waits, 1933), which was based on Maxim Gorky’s fairy tale “Musik der Großstadt” (The Music of the Big City). The work consists of an introduction and nine pieces of music composed by Marcel Rubin, with connecting words by Elias Canetti: “The Boy on the Way to the City,” “The Choir of the Suffering City,” “Dawn,” “Enlightenment,” “Amusement,” “The Unfinished City,” “The Dream of Happiness,” “The Boy Among People,” and “Expectation.” Her choreography reflected on the journey of a young boy to the city, on his fear of and fascination with discovering and experiencing a big city—Gertrud Kraus herself danced the role of the boy. Kraus’s work was a groundbreaking inspiration for Rosenberger; it had a strong political standpoint while touching upon identity politics, not only through her resistance to the pressures of her Jewish identity, but also her confidence in addressing gender-based inequalities. Therefore, revisiting and exploring Kraus’s venture from different perspectives suggests a resourceful viewpoint for Rosenberger as a response. However, as a historical lapse, there is no visual document capturing the performance of the dance play “The City Waits” at Volksheim Ottakring. Thus Rosenberger’s project is an attempt to reflect on this lapse. Two documentaries on Kraus presented in the exhibition, which Rosenberger produced with dance historians Andrea Amort in Vienna and Ruth Eshel in Tel Aviv, focus on these aspects in more detail.

Furthermore, Rosenberger also conducted parallel research on Volkshochschulen (adult education centers) and their shifting significance over the course of a century. The Volksheim Ottakring in Vienna (founded in 1901), where Kraus performed on stage, carried significant cultural and political importance, especially in the interwar period. In the archives of the center, the founding idea was described as follows: “Workers, citizens and university lecturers founded the Volksheim association as a place of higher academic education and rich artistic enjoyment for the broad strata of the working people,”5 with the motto “teach people to think.”6 Important protagonists of Viennese modernism—such as Ernst Mach, Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann, Marianne Hainisch, Elise Richter, Lise Meitner, Eugenie Schwarzwald, Otto Neurath, Alfred Adler, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Jean Améry, but also dancers like Rosalia Chladek or Gertrud Kraus—held lectures, gave courses, or danced and played on the stage of the Volkshochschule Ottakring.7 The stage where Kraus once danced still exists today.

Taking Gertrud Kraus’s dance play “The City Waits” as a starting point, Rosenberger revisits and recontextualizes the forgotten social reform history of the Volkshochschule Ottakring by tracing the footsteps of Kraus. The project unfolds the discipline of dance as a specific poetic space in which art forms, times, and images intermingle with both new and cross references. Hence, by following the interdisciplinary working methodology of Kraus, Rosenberger has organized a set of workshops with young migrants attending the Volkshochschule Ottakring today. Both the workshops and Rosenberger’s extensive research on Gertrud Kraus, conducted in Vienna and Tel Aviv, reflect an inquiry into geographical movements and a migration of thoughts that follow spiral routes across countries: for example, the migration of expressionist dance from Austria to Palestine8; or the migration routes of the workshop participants from the Middle East and Africa to Austria. For instance, in her rehearsals and classes Kraus combined German, English, and Hebrew, which reflected her migration experience and was described as a “multilingual lexicon.”9 Accordingly, Rosenberger asked her workshop participants,10 who also mix many languages while communicating, to express themselves and their migration experiences through storytelling, dancing, singing, and drawing. Throughout these workshops, she has echoed Kraus’s interdisciplinary approach by connecting different accumulated experiences, feelings, and hopes through various artistic expressions across and beyond geographies, people, and time.11

In the closing chapter of her project, Rosenberger collaborated with Loulou Omer, whose mother Zipora Lerman had been Gertrud Kraus’s student in Tel Aviv. This collaboration resulted in a video piece and a series of photographs which interlinked all mentioned elements of Rosenberger’s research. The video appears as the final result of a work in constant expansion and reflects the progress of artistic research and practice over the course of two years.
Omer is a dancer, choreographer, composer, poet, and pianist. Her practice—similar to that of Kraus—encompasses many art forms and approaches. Yet her migration was from Tel Aviv to Europe; thus, she has brought not only memories to Vienna, but also a knowledge of her mother’s versatile artistic approaches. Hence, Omer’s collaboration with Rosenberger also reflects the relevance of the inheritance of this knowledge handed down from mother to daughter.

Rosenberger chose the Volksheim Ottakring stage for Omer’s point of entry to her performance. She also enriched the performance and the video with Lerman’s photographs, as well as visual and textual documents. Grounded in Omer’s reflections on choreographing, singing, dancing, and recalling her mother and Kraus performing, the video renders Rosenberger’s elements of research. Echoing Kraus, Omer also used two languages and demonstrated various techniques and improvisations. She was portraying a strong and profound woman pursuing the complexities and contradictions of the ventures of Kraus, her mother, and herself. With each act she performed, each word she spelled, each note she played, and each memory she recalled, Omer’s world was being pictured. By responding to the heritage of Kraus as a migration journey in pursuit of search, responsiveness, and growth, Rosenberger invites the audience into this journey by entering Omer’s world. Once, Kraus wrote down a line into her sketchbook: “What’s the point of entry? . . . The point of no return . . .”12

Text by Başak Şenova for Camera Austria, Graz I 2020
https://camera-austria.at/en/ausstellungen/isa-rosenberger-the-vast-land-from-which-she-comes/

1 See Judith Brin Ingber, “Identity Peddlers and the Influence of Gertrud Kraus,” Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings 39, supplement S1 (2007), pp. 100–101.
2 Ibid., p. 100.
3 Wikipedia, “Dance in Israel,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_in_Israel.
4 Henia Rottenberg, “Kraus, Gertrud (1901–1977),” The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Modernism, https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/kraus-gertrud-1901-
1977.
5 See Österreichisches Volkshochschularchiv, “Rundgang durch das Volksheim Ottakring,” http://archiv.vhs.at/index.php?id=vhsarchiv-volksheim_ottakring (Trans. B. S.).
6 “Volkshochschule Volksheim Ottakring,” Historiografie, https://adulteducation.at/de/historiografie/institutionen/278/.
7 Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Heimatkunde in Ottakring (ed.), Ottakring: Ein Heimatbuch des 16. Wiener Gemeindebezirkes (Vienna: Österreichischer Schulbücherverlag, 1924), p. 277.
8 Kraus moved to the Mandate Palestine before the State of Israel was established.
9 Ingber, “Identity Peddlers and the Influence of Gertrud Kraus,” p. 103.
10 Participants in the workshop: Wendpanga Marie Balbone, Karolin Kahraman, Ilie Vlah, Albin Bunjaku, Alzuabi Loai, Abib Faye, and Javed Sobhani.
11 Rosenberger brought into play some of the components of this project during her participation in the CrossSections interdisciplinary platform in 2019: photographs, videos, archival materials, workshop results, sketches, and performances. See https://crosssections.kex.wuk.at.
12 In 2007, Zvi Gotheiner talked about how he used Gertrud Kraus’s sketchbooks as a source for his play during an interview with Judith Brin Ingber. See Ingber, °“Identity Peddlers and the Influence of Gertrud Kraus,” p. 103.

Thanks to:
Loulou Omer, Andrea Amort, Ruth Eshel, Başak Şenova, Petra Amster and Volkshochschule Ottakring, Reinhard Mayr, Reinhard Braun, Angelika Maierhofer, Nicole Six, Christina Töpfer, Camera Austria, Nora Sternfeld, Andrea Löbel, Klaus Schafler, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Susanne Kompast, Christian H. Stifter / Österreichisches Volkshochschularchiv, Irit Rogoff, Liora Malka Yellin, Victoria Khodorkovsky / Israeli Dance Archive, Relli De Vries, Wendpanga Marie Balbone, Karolin Kahraman, Ilie Vlah, Albin Bunjaku, Alzuabi Loai, Abib Faye, Javed Sobhani, Lisl Ponger, Brigitte Rosenberger, Hans-Peter Rosenberger, Gustavo Petek, Elke Krasny, Michael Zinganel, Musikverlag Döblinger

……………………………………………………………

... THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES
Installation, 2019* I 2020
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13 C-Prints, each 90 x 60 cm
3 C-Prints, each 40 x 30 cm
……………………………………………………………
Video 1
…THE VAST LAND FROM WHICH SHE COMES
In collaboration with LOULOU OMER
Full HD Video I 21:33 min I German with Engl. subtitles
Dancer, choreographer, singer, speaker, piano player:
LOULOU OMER
Director of Photography:
REINHARD MAYR I AAC
Sound:
GUSTAVO PETEK, REINHARD MAYR
Script:
ISA ROSENBERGER, LOULOU OMER
Editing:
ISA ROSENBERGER
……………………………………………………………
Video 2
INTERVIEW WITH ANDREA AMORT
Full HD Video I 10:29 min I German with English subtitles
Camera:
REINHARD MAYR I AAC
Editing:
ISA ROSENBERGER
……………………………………………………………
Video 3
INTERVIEW WITH RUTH ESHEL
Full HD Video I 11:13 min I English with German subtitles
Camera / editing:
ISA ROSENBERGER
……………………………………………………………
Exhibition display: 2 stage platforms with various archival materials on the work of Gertrud Kraus and photos of Workshop results at Ottakring Adult Education Center, Vienna
……………………………………………………………

 *Following an invitation by Başak Şenova, a first version of the
project was realized by Isa Rosenberger during her participation in the CrossSections interdisciplinary platform and was shown from July 3 to 19, 2019, at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. It was developed further for the exhibition at Camera Austria, Graz, 2020.

……………………………………………………………

Made possible by
Camera Austria, Graz
CrossSections interdisciplinary platform
Federal Chancellery Republic of Austria

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On the occasion of the exhibition, an eponymous book is published in Edition Camera Austria, comprising a text by Nora Sternfeld (ger./eng.).
Edition Camera Austria, Graz 2020.
32 pages, 13 × 21 cm, numerous color illustrations.
ISBN 978-3-902911-56-8
https://camera-austria.at/en/buecher/isa-rosenberger-das-weite-land-woher-sie-kommt/

In collaboration with Tini Trampler and Stephan Sperlich

Full HD Video I 17min I Engl. Subtitles
3 Photo collages,  each 53,5 x 52 cm
© 2014/18

Dedicated to
GINA KAUS

Singer and actress
TINI TRAMPLER

Idea & realization & editing
ISA ROSENBERGER

The Coffeehouse Song
By Playbackdolls - TRAMPLER/SPERLICH
Lyrics, vocals, voice of GINA KAUS by TINI TRAMPLER
Theremin, cello, sound design/engineering by
STEPHAN SPERLICH
1920s music research & collage by 78plus by GUENTHER BERGER

Camera
REINHARD MAYR

Commissioned and supported by
Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, curator: DORS BERGER
Supported by Federal Chancellery of Austria

Café Vienne is a site-specific exhibition developed for the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles by Austrian artist Isa Rosenberger.
Within this immersive installation, which pays tribute to the important cultural role of Viennese coffee houses, Rosenberger honors little-known Jewish writer Gina Kaus (1893–1985).
In the early twentieth century, female artists and writers in particular embraced the coffee house as a place for debate, networking, and inspiration in their quest for political and artistic recognition. Rosenberger uses this setting to focus on Kaus, once a well-known literary figure in Vienna. The bestselling novelist and devout free-thinker was driven from Europe by the Nazi regime, eventually emigrating to the United States, where she became a Hollywood screenwriter. 
Rosenberger introduces Kaus’s legacy through a newly created video work and photographic series. Rosenberger was inspired by Gina Kaus’s ability to adapt to challenging situations in economically and politically precarious conditions and to be successful as a writer in both intellectual and popular circles.
In the video, Rosenberger revives the tradition of Wiener Lieder (Viennese songs), which often commented on social issues with a satirical touch. She worked with Viennese composers Tini Trampler, Stephan Sperlich and Guenther Berger to create a contemporary soundtrack based on old recordings from the 1920s. Singer Tini Trampler wrote new lyrics (based on interviews conducted by Rosenberger with contemporary female artists and writers) and performed the song taking on different personas at the Tanzcafé Jenseits (Dance Café Hereafter) in Vienna in 2014.

Doris Berger (in: press release, Skirball Cultural Center, 2014)

„The coffeehouse gives you a space to dream“, heißt es in einer Liedzeile des Coffeehouse Songs, welcher für die „Queen oft the coffee house“, Gina Kaus (1893 Wien – 1985 Los Angeles, USA) erdichtet und gesungen wird. Isa Rosenberger initiierte diesen Song, den Tini Trampler und Stephan Sperlich in Anspielung an das „Wienerlied“ der 20er-Jahre realisierten. Er ertönt nun im „Cafe Vienne“, das sie in den Räumen von Charim Events für Gina Kaus gestaltet hat und spielt damit an das Wiener Cafe Herrenhof an, welches in der Zwischenkriegszeit, mit der Bestsellerautorin im Mittelpunkt, ein Zentrum der Literaturavantgarde war. Diese emanzipierte Freidenkerin wird so erneut ins kulturelle Gedächtnis eingeschrieben; als österreichisch-jüdisch-amerikanische Schriftstellerin und Drehbuchautorin in Hollywood.

In ihrer Ausstellung erweitert Isa Rosenberger den Kreis einer Hommage und erarbeitet eine Erzählweise unter Verwendung von Video, recherchiertem Material, Inszenierung, Musik und Kollagen. Dabei reflektiert sie auch die Tatsache, dass Erinnerungen in wachsendem Maße durch Medien formatiert und vermittelt werden. Deshalb haben jene auch immer fiktionale Anteile, durch die, der sekundären Traumarbeit ähnlich, erst geschlossene Narrationen erzeugt werden. Der konkrete und fiktionale Erinnerungsraum der Ausstellung ist deshalb bewusst der Gegenwart verpflichtet.Isa Rosenbergers künstlerische Erinnerungsarbeit ist rekonstruierend und geht multiperspektivisch von der Gegenwart aus um Konstellationen zu erfassen. Sie hält ihr so entstandenes Werk möglichst fei von Erklärungen und Behauptungen und macht, durch die medienpoetischen Präsentationsformen die sie wählt, Geschichte ästhetisch erfahrbar. In diesem Sinne ereignet sich Kunst und das Ensemble der Werke vermag Besucher*innen zu aktivieren. Die Ausstellung ist, so gesehen, einem realzeitlichem Bühnengeschehen ähnlich, versehen mit dem Anspruch, dass Erinnerungsräume auch Erfahrungsräume sein sollen in denen wir unsere eigenen Rollen finden und bedenken können. Genau in der Weise, wie Lebensgeschichten ihre Differenzierungen und Bedeutungen als identitätsstiftende Sinnquellen aus den Bezügen zu vielgestaltigen Lebensmomenten gewinnen.

Kurt Kladler

A Film about
STELLA KADMON
and the
THEATER OF COURAGE

With
EMMY WERNER

Camera
REINHARD MAYR

Sound
STEFAN VOGLSINGER

Music
ERNST KRENEK

Idea & realization & editing
ISA ROSENBERGER

Full HD-Video I 20min 44sec I © 2015

Thanks: Emmy Werner, Komödie am Kai, Anton Lederer, Birgit Lurz,
Margarethe Makovec, Wolfgang Schlag, Sissy Koller-Boran, Reinhard Mayr, Stefan Voglsinger, Antje Müller, Ernst Krenek Institut Privatstiftung, Lisl Ponger, Beate Schachinger, Peter Waugh, Michael Zinganel

Realized as part of the exhibition project
HOTEL METROPOLE. DER ERINNERUNG EINE ZUKUNFT GEBEN
INTO THE CITY |
WIENER FESTWOCHEN 2015

COURAGE embarks on a personal odyssey in search of a pioneer of the Viennese theatre scene of the inter-war and post-war years, namely Stella Kadmon (1902–89), the Austrian-Jewish theatre-maker, actress and chansonnier.
Kadmon, who had already opened Vienna’s first political cabaret theatre, Lieber Augustin (‘Dear Augustin’), in 1931, founded the Theater der Courage (‘Theatre of Courage’), a politically committed forum for contemporary, socially critical drama, in 1948, upon
her return from exile in the years between 1938-47.
On the premises of what used to be Kadmon’s workplace (the Theater der Courage on Franz-Josephs-Kai is today the Komödie am Kai), the actress, director and theatre manageress, Emmy Werner, vividly recalls the time she shared with Kadmon as a friend and kindred spirit. The location itself, as well as photos and props from her own personal archive, help Werner to recall and bring to life episodes and moments from Kadmon’s career and private
life. Parallel to this, there emerges an authentic image of Austrian post-war society, complete with its blatant anti-semitism and racism, which was what first induced Kadmon to put on a committedly anti-fascist programme at the Theatre of Courage. In some parts of the film, Werner’s descriptions are condensed into ‘performative’ sequences, in which the actress plays out her memories of Stella Kadmon, thereby literally endowing her with physicality and materiality. In Werner’s role, history as testimony and as narrative overlap.
Following in the tradition of ‘oral history’, Isa Rosenberger gives Emmy Werner free rein as the narrator in a monologue which seems to be oriented to an imaginary audience, and Rosenberger does not interrupt her, either with questions or with interjections. The narrative becomes so touching primarily because it is a personal recollection, and even includes memory gaps and inconsistencies. According to Jan Assman, what constitutes a society is not only its “cultural memory”, which is based on the objective knowledge stored in archives, photographs and patterns of behaviour, but also its “communicative memory”. The latter is distinguished by the fact that it “actualises the past by means of individual memory and experience”, presupposing direct communication. As spectators of this filmic document, we participate in the interactive practice which forms the “communicative memory” of our society, and in doing so counteract, together with the narrator and the filmmaker, the power of forgetfulness.

Georgia Holz

(English translation by Peter Waugh)

© 2009/10

2 b&w photographs, each 118 x 79 cm

(...) In Ruzinov (2009), it was Rosenberger’s plan to pose questions to contemporary witnesses on their views of an architectural monument from the recent past. The scene is a fountain in Bratislava from the 1960s, one of the many post-socialist “voids” in urban space, which, in Rosenberger’s view, prompt a “theatrical restaging”. Rosenberger’s photo series depicts a platform in a water basin that once served as a stage, as well as two concrete frames from which water ripples, forming a curtain of water: for Rosenberger, an allusion to the term “Iron Curtain”, designating the former political division between East and West, as well as referencing the moment of theatricality – in play- houses, iron curtain is the name of a protective barrier between stage and auditorium. Rosenberger actually supplements the photos with a “play”. The actors and actresses are the artist and an interpreter, a person working for the city cleaning the fountain, as well as passers-by whom Rosenberger asks questions about the fountain – youths with a ghetto blaster and an older woman. While the youths appear disinterested, the woman recalls concerts of the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra. She continues saying that she would love to dance on the fountain once, making it her own personal stage. While saying this, the music from the ghetto blaster – Iron Maiden’s Mother Russia – grows louder and louder.

Astrid Wege
(in: artists folder, Künstlerstaette Bleckede, 2009)

DV Pal Video I 16:9 I 13 min 51 sec I ©2010/13

Choreographer, dancer
AMANDA PIÑA

Camera
REINHARD MAYR

Idea & realization & editing
ISA ROSENBERGER

3 photo collages,
each 51,5 cm x 76,5 cm

Installation:
Table (cottonwood plywood, lacquered, 105 x 116 x 322cm)
2 curtain constructions (carbon steel, black fabric, height: 295cm, diameter: 368cm)

Made possible by:
BLOK, Zagreb
bmu:kk, Wien
Grazer Kunstverein

Espiral is Isa Rosenberger’s artistically occupation with the role of Austrian banks in South-East Europe. The approach towards Kurt Jooss’ expressionistic ballet The Green Table (1932), a dance-like description of the connection between power, economy and war in the surrounding of the Weimar Republic and the first world depression, is the central point of view. Another level of this work bases on research on the role of Austrian banks both after the transformation processes in Eastern Europe and also during the time before and after the First World War.
Rosenberger demonstrates connections between the opening in the East as well as the balances and profits of the parent companies in the West.
The title, Espiral (Spiral), is a reference to the dance school of the same name established in Santiago de Chile by Patricio Bunster, a student of Jooss, which enabled children of underprivileged parents to get an education.
Espiral is the fascinating artistically realization of a complex research that brings together East-European transformation processes and economical interests. The project requests the possibilities of artistically intervention within the connections of power, money and history. At the same time, it presents, in relation to Jooss’ Green Table, likewise the timelessness as well as the necessity of this occupation. 

Søren Grammel
(Grazer Kunstverein, 2011)

Further information / press:

http://www.grazerkunstverein.org/

http://www.textezurkunst.de

https://www.frieze.com

http://www.artmagazine.cc/content53923.html
http://www.mhauffen.de

Video installation I © 2008

Video/ DV 17min
Cast
RUZENA DINKOVÁ, JUDITA DINKOVÁ, JASMINA DINKOVÁ
Camera
REINHARD MAYR
Idea & realization & editing
ISA ROSENBERGER

Design model after the original construction plan of the Nový Most-restaurant (chipboard, chairs), app. 3x3x2,40m: construction plan / MICHAEL HIESLMAIR,
production / WIENER SECESSION

C-Print 40 x 59,5cm, framed
 

“After long considerations, plans and discussions, the construction of the second bridge will begin,” an announcer of the former Slovakian television station declared in the 1970s. Avowed pride in the bridge that was built between 1967 and 1972 as the futuristic landmark of Bratislava; no word that the endeavour was contested due to the partial destruction of the old baroque part of town. Isa Rosenberger’s video Novy Most (2008) combines archive material from the time when the bridge was built with personal reflections of three generations of women – grandmother, daughter and granddaughter. She uses the bridge as an ideologically charged, 
architectural monument as the starting point of her examination of the relationship between postsocialist East and capitalist West – the story of the bridge becomes an indicator of a changing society. Isa Rosenberger contrasts the official accounts with the subjectivity of remembered (hi)stories, linking two competing forms of reference to the past that correct and complement each other. The associated changes in perspective can be grasped as an act of participation and empowerment – as a revision of the customary, often clichéd interpretations. The film always reveals the awareness that it is less about historical facts than about the potential impact of interpreted and appropriated historical experiences.

Astrid Wege
(in: artists folder, Künstlerstätte Bleckede, 2009)

Video/ DV 27min
6 flags in front of the women’s centre of Wolfen
4 C-Prints, framed, each 52cm x 42cm
Exhibition display: Paravent (plywood construction, painted) 4m x 2.40m, base: 50cm x 70cm x 70cm
© 2005/6

Cast
CHRISTEL BÄR, MAGDALENA BRANDL, PETRA DRAUSCHKE, BIRGITT HEINICKE, DIANA HILLER, SONJA JOHN, ROTRAUT NIESS, ELVIRA RADEK, ISA ROSENBERGER, BIRGIT WESSEL A.O.

Camera
RUTH KAASERER, ISA ROSENBERGER

Editing
JULIA PONTILLER,
ISA ROSENBERGER

The project is a cooperation with the women’s centre of Wolfen, formerly a town with major chemical plants in Eastern Germany, and was realized within the framework of a grant of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig for the exhibition project “Shrinking Cities – Interventions”.

NEW HEROINES

In 2004 Isa Rosenberger was invited to participate in “Schrumpfende Staedte” [Shrinking cities], a cooperation between Projektbuero Philipp Oswalt, the Bauhaus Dessau, archplus and Galerie fuer Zeitgenoessische Kunst. She resolved she would do it together with the women of the women’s centre of Wolfen-Nord, Christel Bär, Birgitt Heinicke, Diana Hiller, Sonja John, Rotraut Nieß, Elvira Radek and Birgit Wessel.
As in her former projects Rosenberger started off with mental and medial images that have an identity creating function, in this particular case images linked to the situation of women in shrinking cities/regions. Having been Heroines of Work before the Changes – the Monument to the Working Woman at a Chemical Factory (Gerhard Markwald, 1964) in front of the former ORWO building at Wolfen was significant for the era – most of the female workers of the film manufacturing factory lost their jobs after the Changes. They became the losers in an economic and politico- economic sense. However, this “label and its passive connotation gets in the way of appreciating the multilayered situation and the manifold activities of women” (Rosenberger). The artist was interested in the alternative strategies developed by women when jobs become scarce and identification beyond gainful employment becomes a necessity. A group of active women of the women’s centre of Wolfen-Nord made up their minds to collaborate with Isa Rosenberger and investigate what was different in the public perception of women before and after the Changes, in particular the discrepancy between the internal and external perception of the role of once working but today unemployed women. Some project ideas having been dismissed they agreed to erect a new (contemporary) monument in continuation of the local tradition of the above mentioned monument: the Workwoman at a Chemical Factory, erected in 1965, was intended to represent the 8000 female workers in a factory with the highest percentage of female workers in the GDR. But what form of (self)representation could replace that?
In a film “A Monument for the Women´s Centre (The Making Of)” shot by Isa Rosenberger the erection of a new monument is the starting point and leitmotif but at the same time the reason and occasion for taking the situation of the women into the public. In the course of the film many people discuss the planned monument which was to consist of two rows of flags bearing fragmented sentences – 1. Staying, 2. And Going, 3. Courage to Try Out, 4. Our Strength, 5. Colours not Grey,
6. Turn Yourself Around – local decision makers are involved and supporters male and female are recruited.
The collectively created texts on the flags also constitute the structure of the film. In six sequences the initiators talk about their lives, analyse and comment on their new situation in society after the Changes and actively advance their concerns – accompanied by the music of the band “Rammstein”. Historical flashbacks such as a GDR commercial or excerpts from the first colour film containing
material from Wolfen, parts of a radio interview on MDR (an Eastern German radio station) or a regional TV broadcast covering the making of the new monument, show up the discrepancies between the old and new identification. Via images of the “Heroine of Work”, contrasting and rich in contrast, the state-decreed optimism of the GDR, reports about untoward working conditions in the film factory or the loss of social importance suffered by older women, Rosenberger succeeds in highlighting the changes in the (ideological) attitudes as well as making them plausible.
“The Making Of” concerns itself with the (symbolical) set of values which has been up-rooted by an overthrow of the political system and by economic pressure. The participants discuss alternative forms of representation intended to find individual and collective attention for those excluded from the focus of society. But it becomes obvious through the film that even this form of (self)representation is brittle and not at all self-evident but has been hard- earned. Agreed, the flags can be read as the expression of a new self-esteem but in the end a difference in public estimation seems to be owed to the inner attitude, different mental images and identity creating medial images. Seen in that light the flags function as the outward sign of a radical change of attitudes.

The film calls attention to the real consequences of a symbolic production of images, i.e. changes in the make-up of the society, the immediate living conditions and the everyday actions of the people concerned.
The appropriation of mental and medial images and the emancipative shift going along with it runs like a red thread through the film and becomes particularly obvious in the film’s last scene where Magdalena Brandl, herself a former ORWO worker and model for the recently removed Working Woman at a Chemical Factory, mounts the now empty pedestal. 

Barbara Steiner

16 b/w photographs,
45 x 30,5 cm each
Polish and German text version
© 2007

In her filmic and photographic works Isa Rosenberger examines transformation processes in former eastern-bloc countries. Starting from specific sites – in an exchange with the population – the constructions of official historical writing, as well as its rejection, reinterpretation or overwriting through individual historical designs are revealed. Until 1990 the »Warsaw Nike« stood on Theatre Square, initially »honouring the heroes of Warsaw 1939–1945«, then as a symbol of the communist regime. After its dismantling, the Nike was re-erected after public protests, but at a distant spot near the east-west motorway. Photographic views taken while walking around the monument are subtitled with comments of passers- by. The double changes of perspectives reflect the personal and social shifts of meaning. Different ideas of representation clash, take turns, are projected onto the figure. The role between artist and tourist is reflected by having a new level emerge through the connections and differences between spoken text, read text and photograph. On this level the missing synchronicities of a social condition, its simultaneous elements and multiple layers become evident.

Stefanie Hoch (in: press release, Landesgalerie Linz, 2010)

In collaboration with Martina Berisha,
Margaret Carter, Martha Vollnhofer
& VinziRast Wien

This film and photo series was made in 2021 as a commissioned work for the exhibition arm & reich (poor & rich) at the Dom Museum Vienna, which examined the facets of socio-economic inequalities through artistic positions.

For Got it rough ’cause I’m a She, Isa Rosenberger worked for several months with Martina Berisha, Margaret Carter and Martha Vollnhofer, three women threatened by homelessness and now living at the VinziRast shelter in Vienna. Based on personal experiences, the women collaboratively developed a manifesto that addressed the issue of women’s poverty from different perspectives. This was then carried in excerpts and in the form of protest posters by the three protagonists to the Heldenplatz in Vienna – and so taken visibly into public space. Rosenberger interweaves scenes of the action in urban space with joint discussions as well as factual and associative-performative levels – such as the wordrap by Margaret Carter – to create a multi-perspective film collage about women and poverty.

The installation at the Kunsthaus Graz also offered take-away posters, with a picture of the action at the Heldenplatz and a text on women’s poverty in Austria by Michaela Moser (Österreichische Armutskonferenz).

(Text: Alexandra Trost)

……………………………….………………………..…

Got it rough ’cause I’m a She
2021

In collaboration with Martina Berisha,
Margaret Carter, Martha Vollnhofer
& VinziRast Wien

Made possible by
Dom Museum Wien
……………………………….………………………..…
3 C-Prints, 60 x 80 cm, framed
……………………………….………………………..…
Full-HD-Video I 11 min I
German with English subtitles

Photography, Camera, Sound
Reinhard Mayr I AAC

Script, editing
Isa Rosenberger
……………………………….………………………..…

Text in signal red metal letters,
displayed on a building wall in Metahofpark, Graz,
dimension: appr. 6 x 10 m
© 2011

In collaboration with
MARIANNA ASATRJAN, ANYA DITCHKOVSKAYA, ENDAH EBNER, ROSEMARY EMIOHE, MERHANISA HUSKIC, MARISOL KAHRRILLO and JAMILEH PAHLEVAN

Realised in the framework of “Annenviertel! Kunst des urbanen Handelns”, organised by <rotor> association for contemporary art, Graz

Being different without being a stranger.
Manifestos are always political. Directed „at the world,“ they publically articulate positions counter to the hegemony of an established order, programs for a neces- sary reorientation, and calls for alternative ways of thinking and acting. The text in signal red letters displayed on a building wall in Graz ́s Metahofpark, extols and emphasizes six demands that could probably be adopted by every passer-by:
Working without prohibition, living without fear, laughing without worries, walking without stopping, falling without staying down, being different without being a stranger. 
The main text is preceded by two lines featuring a font design that subordinates them to the former. They make clear what it is that needs to be opposed:
Calling without answer, speaking without understanding, screaming without hearing, women without work, people without rights, living without a future.
In both parts of the wall text, which lends the existential content a precise, visual- poetic form, the preposition without becomes an insistent hinge for the switch between positive and negative perspectives. The effect is one of an alternation between wish and reality such that fundamental human needs cannot be separated from social and political contexts. Switching between the two perspectives is presented as the precondition of possible change. The question of how is left open to reflection. Together with a longer version of the Annenviertel Manifest set to music, the text marks the end of a communication process in which Isa Rosenberger and seven women from the neighborhood invested nearly a year. Proceeding from the questions of how to counter the politics of memory that has resulted in a lack of visibilty for the specific experiences and achievements of women, in particular those with migration backgrounds, in public space and what platforms of articulation can be created by artistic means, they reflected together on life in Austria, work and employment possibilities, integration and preconceptions. 
Not for the first time it is the personal perspectives of women with which Isa Rosenberger, based on her interest in social, political and economic transformation processes, confronts official models of representation and narration in order to expose fault lines in codified social orders and ascriptions.

Birgit Kulterer
(in: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark 2011, Wien 2013)

5 photo collages with text engraved in glas, each 45 x 30 cm,
2 photo collages with text engraved in glas, each 30 x 45cm
Wall text
2012

Wall text:

White Shadows (For Ella Briggs)

I should have a come a few years earlier, they tell me, and no, there’s no-one still alive today who might remember the earliest days of the Pestalozzihof. None of the inhabitants whom I ask are even familiar with the name of the architect, Ella Briggs, who designed the Pestalozzihof apartment house, a hostel for single people, in Vienna in 1925–27.
Ella Briggs was the first female architect to work in Austria and, together with Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, was one of only two women allowed to participate in the communal housing programme of so-called ‘Red Vienna’. In those days, female architects were usually entrusted with the work of interior design, since they were only credited with an aptitude for certain gender-specific areas of responsibility – in particular that of kitchen furnishings. Briggs’ architectural success is therefore all the more remarkable: the Pestalozzihof is a spacious and multifaceted structure.
Nevertheless, Ella Briggs has largely been forgotten as an architect. As a Jew, she fled National Socialism and emigrated to London in autumn 1936. “It is impossible to get any work in Vienna”, she writes in a letter of the same year.
Significantly, not a single photograph of her has so far emerged to give us an idea of her appearance. According to one critic of the time, “by also supervising the interior design of the houses that she has designed, the artist aims to achieve a rare harmonious consistency between the external and the internal character of her creations.”

Isa Rosenberger

Video / Beta SP, 30 min
Citymaps
© 2002

With
Igor Bararon, Ajdin Bašić, Naida Begeta, Suzana Cerić, Lejla Hodžić, Ognjenka Raščić, Arslan Raščić, Faruk Šabanović

Idea & camera & editing
Isa Rosenberger

Sarajevo Guided Tours shows eight different locations within a city, the individual urban excerpts organized into brief, discrete segments. While the title refers to the format of a touristís gaze and experience, Isa Rosenberger subverts the idea of a guided tour by examining the question of how places are invented. “Guided tours” usually concentrate on highlights in the conventional sense. They are incorporated into this moment of the extraordinary construction, which serves as a catalyst for Rosenberger’s portrait of the city, a story resembling both documentary videography and subjective narration. The footage was shot during the artist´s ten-day visit to Sarajevo in April 2001. Invited to tour the city as part of the At First Sight project, an initiative organized by the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), eight individuals she meets during her stay are asked to take her to places with a special personal significance and then describe them. The result is eight consecutive portraits of public spaces and their inhabitants in which private and public history are woven into a fabric of architectural impressions, individual perspectives and ideas, and structural, factual data concerning everyday life in a city still associated primarily with images of the siege and destruction. The portraits are preceded by a prologue: Black-and-white television footage, taken from The Sarajevo Tunnel by Edis Kolar, shows the May 1992 siege. In the course of the work the prologue, the title and the portraits merge to form a text both real and imaginary entitled “Sarajevo“.

Rike Frank (for sixpackfilm, 2002)
 

It may be incredible to talk playfully and ironically about Sarajevo, but Rosenberger proves it is possible.
It seems inconceivable, yet Isa Rosenberger still managed to make a film that is playful and ironic about the severely damaged and traumatised city of Sarajevo. With charm and heartwarming nonchalance, the director succeeded in presenting the profundity of such a fresh and black history lightheartedly, without becoming superficial. On the contrary. Rosenberger asked eight different young people to choose a spot in the city that has a special significance to them. At those places, the young people talk about their choice. The humour makes the unspeakable speakable, while the avoidance of gravity frees the way for real emotion.

(Text: IFFR International Filmfestival Rotterdam)

Distributed by sixpackfilm:
http://www.sixpackfilm.com/de/catalogue/show/1212

Full HD Video I 17min I English and Russian subtitles
© 2013

With
VLADIMIR KOGAN

Camera
ISA ROSENBERGER,
MICHAEL ZINGANEL

Idea & realization & editing
ISA ROSENBERGER

Realised within the framework of “Lenin:Icebreaker”, an exhibition on the first atomic icebreaker “Lenin” in Murmansk and a special project of the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, curated by Stella Rollig and Simon Mraz.

The Video The Captain (Valdimir ́s Voyage) focuses on the life and career of Captain Vladimir Kogan.
In the former Soviet Union Vladimir Kogan was a captain for many years, sailing the world on large merchant ships. After the turmoil and upheaval that followed 1989 he found himself drifting to Brighton Beach, also known as “Little Russia”, a district of New York in Southern Brooklyn, known for its large number of Russian-speaking immigrants. 
A second narrative layer takes as its point of reference the famous “Kitchen Debate”. During a visit to the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 as part of a cultural exchange program, the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the then United States Vice President Richard Nixon had an improvised debate on the pros and cons of communism versus capitalism in front of live TV cameras. During that same trip to the USSR in 1959 Nixon also visited the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin, where he gave a short address to the crew: “The Soviet and the State of Alaska are only 40 miles apart. Very little ice for the powerful Lenin. The two nations must work together to break the ice between them!” 
Vladimir ́s Voyage is preceded by a fictional scenario: Khrushchev and Nixon meet in the afterlife and are compelled to continue their Kitchen debate for all eternity. 
Vladimir ́s Voyage tells about the deep relationship between a captain and the sea, which ultimately is his true home. At the same time Vladimir ́s Voyage is a journey between continents and eras, between political systems and ideologies and between reality and the world of the undead.

More information / press:

Die Eisbrecher von Matthias Wilm
http://archiv.kunsthalle-mainz.de/de/ausstellungen/blog/die-eisbrecher/

Captain Russia by Isa Rosenberger
https://www.frieze.com/article/captain-russia

Die raue See der Vergangenheit von Simon Hadler
http://orf.at/stories/2199011/2199013/

THE MUSEUM OF BURNING QUESTIONS is a para-museum realised as a collaboration between the curator NORA STERNFELD of freethought*, the artist ISA ROSENBERGER & THE RETIRED FIREMEN OF BERGEN in Bergen’s historic Brandstasjon (fire station) and in Bergen Kunsthall within the framework of Bergen Assembly 2016.
The MUSEUM OF BURNING QUESTIONS uses the history of fire fighting in Bergen as a starting point, yet situates itself in broader questions about infrastructure. In this sense, it addresses the future of museums and burning questions about contemporary politics and culture. Hosted by Bergen's retired firemen who are occupying the Brandstasjon, The Museum of Burning Questions does not try to represent their occupation. Instead, it performs a temporary alliance with the firemen's specific claim to found a Fire Museum. It exists as far as it is enacted: in moments of debate about burning questions and imaginations of another possible future.
The occupying former firemen offer guided tours of the fire station. By pre-enacting the future Fire Museum, they give insights in the history of fire and their struggle for a Fire Museum in Bergen. 

THE PARTISAN CAFÉ
at Bergen´s historic Brandstasjon (fire station)

At the heart of THE MUSEUM OF BURNING QUESTIONS is the PARTISAN CAFÉ, a central contact zone located in the occupied fire station and conceived as an educational/performative/artistic practice by NORA STERNFELD of freethought with artist and educator JENNY MOORE, and designed by artist ISA ROSENBERGER in collaboration with architect HEIDI PRETTERHOFER.
The title ‘the Partisan café’  borrows directly from “the Partisan Coffee House” – a space for gatherings, conversation and debate in London Soho in the late 1950s, organised by the New Left. Our use of the name is not nostalgic but an actualisation, with burning questions of today, we relate to it and appropriate it: partisan instead of participation. As “participation” has become a main engine of neoliberal transformation, formulating and taking up dissident stances seems necessary. Rather than interacting within prescribed situations, the Partisan cafe is based on building situated knowledges and actions, radical hospitality, reciprocities and commonalities. During the five weeks of Bergen Assembly 2016 the Partisan Café will be a shared space and a meeting place, open to the public and hosting a programme of events, discussions, screenings and music to explore the political, urban and cultural dimensions of our infrastructural condition.
THE PARTISAN CAFÉ team of educators and café workers consists of TORA ENDESTAD BJØRKHEIM, FREJA BÄCKMAN, KABIR CARTER, JOHNNY HERBERT, JENNY MOORE, ARNE SKAUG OLSEN, and NORA STERNFELD

THE DANCING TABLES ARCHIVE
at Bergen Kunsthall

The DANCING TABLES ARCHIVE is the archive of the Museum of Burning Questions. From A to Z it assembles urgent topics that have been addressed and debated in the course of Bergen Assembly 2016.
THE DANCING TABLES ARCHIVE also shows ISA ROSENBERGER’s film BRANDSTASJON about the initiative by retired firemen to establish a Fire Museum in the occupied former Fire station. The film introduces stories related to the labour of the firemen and their struggle for the establishment of their museum, to the history of fire in Bergen and what kind of impact fire had on the development of the city. A central question and point of reference is what the firemen involved in the project consider as the most “burning questions” for them in terms of their vision of a Fire Museum as much as in relation to what seems to be addressed about the world today. A copy of this film project will be donated to the Fire Museum and will be part of their permanent collection.

Thanks
ØYVIN KONGLEVOLL, EINAR K. GJESSING, KNUT GRIMSTAD, ATLE JAKOBSEN, BJØRN E. JOHANNESSEN
from Bergen Firemens Historic Club / Bergen Brandkorps Historielag
freethought
HEIDI PRETTERHOFER
LISL PONGER
STEFAN TÖRNER and Team
KRISTOFFER JUL-LARSEN
BERGEN ASSEMBLY 2016

*freethought is a collective platform for research, pedagogy, and production.
Irit Rogoff, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis Moreno and Nora Sternfeld formed freethought in 2011. 

See also:
Ein Gespräch mit Nora Sternfeld und Isa Rosenberger im Rahmen der Bergen Assembly. Von Inge Pett. http://www.art-in.de/

Full HD Video, 37 Minutes, 2017

Comissioned by KUNSTHAUS GRAZ
Produced for the exhibition
Up into The Unknown – Peter Cook, Colin Fournier and the Kunsthaus23.09.2017–25.03.2018

Interviews with
Rainer Binder-Krieglstein
Peter Cook
Colin Fournier
Niels Jonkhans
Barbara Steiner

Music / Performer
Rainer Binder-Krieglstein

Camera
Reinhard Mayr I AAC

Sound
Stefan Voglsinger

Script, editing
Isa Rosenberger

Reflections on the structural architecture and music of the 1960s gave rise to the concept of Isa Rosenberger´s film. This new Architecture, articulated both by the group Team 10 and the British group Archigram, challenged the notion of stable, permanent buildings, instead promoting the idea of platforms with a flexible, adaptable, participative and fluid form. The first plans developed for the Kunsthaus Graz by architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier are an immediate continuation of this concept. In this film, Rosenberger picks up on the idea of a platform, but also shifts this towards the conflict zone, where we find  a clash between architectonic, artistic and museological but also political and economic beliefs. Interviews with the architects Cook, Fournier and Niels Jonkhans as well as the director of the Kunsthaus, investigate the origins of the Kunsthaus, associated expectations and the perception of the building today.
Another Reference point for  Rosenberger is Experiencing Architecture, a 1959 publication issued by Stehen Eiler Rasmussen, in which music and composition are employed in the perception of architecture. The author examines how, for example, rhythm organises movements of light and shadow, or how material contrasts are suggestive of melodic sequences. Following up on these ideas, Rosenberger invited Graz-based musician Rainer Binder-Krieglstein to write and perform the music for her film about the Kunsthaus and its protagonists. In keeping with his long-term interest in improvisation, his piece took a sponaneous turn when performed: Binder-Krieglstein uses the building itself as a musical instrument. 
In Rosenberger´s film, the term improvisation operates as a thematic link between architecture and music, expanded into aspects of pop culture. The title of the film, The Sky is Glass, refers to a line from the 1967 song, Armenia, City in the Sky by the British band The Who. Rainer Binder-Krieglstein improvises on the same kind of drums used by bands like Led Zeppelin. The Kunsthaus itself is, after all, essentially the product of influences from popular culture that date back to the 1960s.

Barbara Steiner

2 channel-video I 2012/15

With
KAREL PEČKO
ANDREJA HRIBERNIK
MARKO KOŠAN
KARL VOUK
OLIVER RATHKOLB
BARBARA STEINER
and a graphic response by
ANNA LENA VON HELLDORFF

Full-HD-Video I 25 min 40 sec

The exhibition with the title PEACE, HUMANITY AND FRIENDSHIP AMONG NATIONS, organised in 1966 by the artist Karel Pečko, was the first of several international exhibitions held in the Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti (Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts) in Slovenj Gradec in the 1960s and 1970s under the patronage oft the United Nations.
The exhibition concept was dedicated to the idealistic and utopian principles – peace, humanity and friendship among nations – of the UN. Artists from about 40 nations, many of them related to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), participated and international artists like Henry Moore, Victor Vasarely or Ossip Zadkine exhibited in the small town of Slovenj Gradec.
Slovenj Gradec is located near the Slovenian-Austrian (former Yugoslavian-Austrian) border – back then part of the "iron curtain".
It was also a unique occurrence in Slovenia that a new gallery was built specifically for this occasion.

The (re-)reading of the exhibition catalogue from 1966 with its utopian approach serves as a starting point to reflect about a re-evaluation of these ideals in the present.

Realised as part of the exhibition projects:
Public Speech, 2012
Performing the Museum, 2015
Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts

Made possible by:
Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts
Bundeskanzleramt Österreich

2-Channel-Video-Installation
HD-Video, 30 min, © 2017
German with English subtitles

Comissioned by Dom Museum Wien

Art Cologne 1967: After a group of exponents of the avant-garde — artists, critics, and gallery owners — had gone on a pub crawl in the evening after the opening of the first international fair for contemporary art, one of them invited the night owls to come to Cologne Cathedral where he said the early morning Mass.
What sounds like a concept for an artistic performance is actually one of the frequently told anecdotes that made Monsignor Otto Mauer such a famous figure of the postwar art world. As cathedral preacher, chaplain, priest, head of a gallery, and art critic, Mauer embodied the connection between art and the Church. He decisively informed the years during and after World War II with his powerful sermons and endeavors to propagate advanced art.
Isa Rosenberger’s video work dedicated to the founder of the legendary “Galerie St. Stephan” and patron of such influential artists as Arnulf Rainer and Maria Lassnig unfolds this wide range of anything but consonant activities as its leitmotif. The two-channel video shows sequences of interviews with contemporary witnesses, photographs, posters, and, above all, works of the Otto Mauer Collection in the possession of the Dom Museum Wien, presenting them alternately next to each other. The interplay between words, materials, and pictorial rhythm ensures the “pivotal figure’s” tangibleness.
Rosenberger is primarily concerned with the issue of memory in her film works and installations. The individuals’ subjective views are confronted with additional media. The resultant web of varied perspectives and stories allows a different view of things and brings forth new narratives whose complexity makes for a lively impression.

Johanna Schwanberg

Interviews with:
LINDA CHRISTANELL
ROBERT FLECK
UTA KRAMMER
OSWALD OBERHUBER
ARNULF RAINER
GÜNTER ROMBOLD
GUSTAV SCHÖRGHOFER
JOHANNA SCHWANBERG

Camera
REINHARD MAYR I AAC

Script, editing
ISA ROSENBERGER

https://dommuseum.at/collection/monsignore_was_kunst_sei_rosenberger

As part of

The Dream of a Fairytale Temple

Artistic Interventions by Werner Feiersinger, Maria Flöckner/ Hermann Schnöll/Norbert Mayr, Isa Rosenberger and Esther Stocker Regarding Festival Theatres Never Built

Numerous plans for a festival theatre in Salzburg were mooted over the last 130 years and went unrealized. For the centenary of the Salzburg Festival, it is possible to see and experience four of these unbuilt architectural projects: on the Mönchsberg, in the park of Schloss Hellbrunn, on the Kapuzinerberg and in the Mirabell Gardens. The projects document how the festival theatres would have made their mark on the city or its surrounding countryside.

The artistic interventions will be accessible in public spaces from July 2020 to summer 2021.

Concept: Norbert Mayr
Commissioned by the Salzburg Festival

Isa Rosenberger - Portal frame for the Mirabell Gardens
Intervention for the Festival Theatre Project in the Mirabell Gardens, 1950/51 (Architect Clemens Holzmeister, Ankara)

The three-part portal frame of gold-painted steel (19.5 x 7.5m)* is situated in the axis of Holzmeister's festival theatre project and abstracts the outlines of the planned three backstage portals.

The architect wanted to present the stage and auditorium as a unity and overcome the boundary between nature and architecture. Max Reinhardt's founding idea of the festival, "the city as a stage", would thus have been realised.

"If one wishes an almost immeasurably large stage space, one opens the three portals of the backstage and enters a theatre area - such as only the Medici possessed in the Boboli Gardens in Florence," wrote the theatre scholar and author Joseph Gregor at the time about Holzmeister's "Music Olympiad Project".

Rosenberger´s intervention refers to the unity of stage and auditorium, overcoming of the boundary between nature and architecture: The view of the Mirabell Gardens and the fortress is "framed," the city itself becomes an (open-air) stage. The visitors themselves thus become actors in the "world theatre" and new points of view and perspectives can be experienced.

Holzmeister´s festival theatre project was to extend over a total length of around 110 metres from Auerspergstraße to Rosenhügel. However, the Rosenhügel would have had to be demolished for the monumental building.
Rosenberger thus also demonstrates the monumentality of Holzmeister's festival theatre project.

The portal frame is complemented by a radio play**, which is available on the Festival's homepage – a fictitious dialogue spoken by the ghost of Joseph Gregor, the author of Clemens Holzmeister. The architectural work I: Works for the theater (Vienna 1953), as well as an art historian and an architectural historian: The radio play begins with the laying of the foundation stone for the Festspielhaus in the Mirabell Gardens, which Holzmeister described as "tragicomic".
In the course of the play, a dialogue develops about different points of view and perspectives on the past, present and future of the Salzburg Festival and the "the city as a stage“.

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/feentempel

* Thanks to Firma ZIEGLER Stahlbau Salzburg. (Steel 100% recyclable)
**Thanks to Hildegard Fraueneder, Norbert Mayr, Michael Zinganel and to Julian Sharp and Johannes Wolf.

Neonsign (70cm x 4m),
5 posters (each 118x84cm),
velvet-curtain,
cinema-program selected by local residents
© 2006

In collaboration with
MELEK ES, HAWA AND ISI HISRIEVA, MLADEN JOCIC, SERENA FERRARESE AND KURT ROSENKRANZ

Realized in the framework of GESCHICHTE(N) VOR ORT, a project in public space around the Volkertmarkt in Vienna (curated by Michal Kolecek, Margarethe Makovec and Roland Schöny)

In dialogue with the residents of the Volkert and Alliierten Quarter, for GESCHICHTE(N) VOR ORT Isa Rosenberger set up a temporary summer cinema entitled “Trafik Kino”. The youth center J.at alte Trafik was found to be the perfect venue. The center, which is named after a newspaper shop in the square that has meanwhile been shut down, also has a central position in Volkertplatz. With neon lighting, film posters and velvet curtains the building was adapted as a temporary cinema, where films were presented every Monday evening during the exhibition. The films, which were selected by the residents of the quarter, focus on different cities that are significant to those choosing them for individual reasons. For the film presentations Isa Rosenberger produced special opening credits, in which the people selecting the films speak in a location in Vienna, which also has special significance for them. They talk about the film of their choice and their per- sonal relationship to the city thematized in the film, but also about their relationship to Vienna. For instance, during a ride on the giant ferris wheel in Vienna, Isi Hisrieva explains: “The film Crossing the Bridge – The Sound of Istanbul shows the city and life in Istanbul very well. The director Fatih Akin did that well. In Vienna, the Prater reminds me of Istanbul. When you get out of one ride and into another in Prater, your feelings change. Sometimes you are excited, sometimes scared. In Istanbul it is like that too. As soon as you leave the city, you feel as though you have woken up from a dream. Istanbul is a fairy-tale land. It is difficult for me here. Letting go of your own country, leaving your home country is terrible. Your future is left hanging in the air, you don’t know what will become of you.”

Margarethe Makovec

In collaboration with Ricarda Denzer

Ronda Zheng, a phantom and cult figure, entered the Viennese art scene in the 1990s, and was connected to the artistic careers of Ricarda Denzer and Isa Rosenberger.
Ronda’s name first appeared on the invitation for a group show at the Secession in Vienna in 1993. There, Denzer and Rosenberger secretly entered Ronda Zheng’s name onto a list of (mainly male) artists. Thereafter Ronda “took place” as a series of events, without her ever appearing in person: She invited people to the 1994 Start of the Art Season in a private apartment, staged a public group therapy session for artists’ collectives, had a palm-reading session, and with calling cards she invited people to leave messages on her answering machine.
The fictitious artist functioned as a projection surface for her two initiators, and as a myth created by those who accepted her invitations. Zheng’s artistic career was not exactly linear; on the contrary, it was marked by division, shifting, and changes of direction, caused by the many participants in her creation and their collective authorship.

Text by Georgia Holz

More documentation: http://ricardadenzer.net/Ronda-Zheng-1993-1997

Exhibitions:
I am another world: Artistic Authorship between Desubjectivization and Recanonization xhibit, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, curated by Georgia Holz, Claudia Slanar, 2014
With a Name like Yours, You might be any Shape, Kunstpavillion, Innsbruck; UC Irvine University Gallery, Los Angeles, curated by Georgia Holz, Claudia Slanar, 2012/13
Coming Up, Museum Moderner Kunst, 20er Haus, Wien / Vienna, curated by Rainer Fuchs, Judith Fischer, 1996
The Spring Project, Österreichische Galerie, Atelier Augarten, Wien / Vienna, curated by Doris Guth and Matthias Michalka, 1995
U.K.F. Bundesländertournee, Galerie 5020, Salzburg; O.K Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz; The Thing Vienna, Wien / Vienna; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, curated by Simon Wachsmuth and Michael Zinganel, 1995
Concrete Vision, Anarat Higutyn Monastry School, Istanbul, curated by Fatih Aydoğdu, 1995
Desiring Authors Enveloping Myths, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, curated by Juli Carson, 1995
Neulich bei Frau Novak, Trabant, Wien / Vienna, solo exhibition, 1994
group-dynamics, solo exhibition, Galerie 5020, Salzburg, 1994 Saisoneröffnung 1994, Privatraum / private space, Wien / Vienna,
1993 A Viennese Story, Secession Wien / Vienna, curated by Jérôme Sans