Christiana Perschon. Spending Time, Holding Space • das weisse haus • 2024
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Display Artist • Elisabeth Kihlström
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Curatorial Advisor • Anne Faucheret
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Christiana Perschon’s films are portraits that do not pierce intimacies, tributes that do not sacralize, images that do not represent, frames that do not separate. Spending time means working, devoting oneself and caring. Holding spacemeans embracing, occupying and maintaining. These actions characterize feminist artistic work as much as reproductive labor. Attached together, the four words that form the show’s title describe core methods of Christiana Perschon’s work, along with listening and noticing and being affected by others. In her works, the artist builds a framework for her protagonists to appear, interact and create moving images together with her camera – to which she confers its own agency.
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In dialogue with women artists of previous generations, Christiana Perschon developed a specific method of portrayal, invoking and incorporating the artistic working process of the protagonist – or one of its aspects. Each filmic portrait has its own logic and aesthetic. The show features two new films: Stille verschieben is a three-channel video with Inge Dick, standing out against a twilight sky seemingly infinite, aboard an old barge, that causes the camera and the horizon to gently sway. Christiana Perschon spends time with Inge Dick, who has meticulously investigated the passage of time as it translates into shifts of color and light, and invites the viewer to question standardized daily temporalities. In the short black-and-white 16 mm film Friedl, protagonist Friedl vom Gröller creates translucent screens out of cigarette smoke, her hand, her smile, or her sparing words subtly but firmly determining her own image: little tricks, haptic images, singular truths, trustful reciprocity. Nearby the analogue projection, a filmstrip loop hanging to be touched and viewed unveils shots of Christiana Perschon, this time taken by Friedl vom Gröller herself. In Nursing an idea and a baby are the same not two different acts on simultaneously the same body artist mothers come on stage with their babies to change diapers. Nursing in front of a gigantic cinematic screen – center stage – their gestures act as resistance, holding space in a place that usually makes the conditions of production (and re-production) disappear.
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Christiana Perschon intervenes in the relationship between the filmmaker, the camera and the protagonist(s), as much as between the viewer and the film itself, recalibrating these around relationality and interdependence. The collective creation process operates outside dominant (patriarchal) norms of representation and regimes of gaze – commonly based on a one-sided relation between who films and “what” is filmed, who looks at and “what” is looked at, determined by objectification and fetishization. Understanding film as the materialization of encounters, relations, affects and effects, Christiana Perschon’s films are opaque, mysterious, sensible and sensuous.
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Spending Time, Holding Space is the first solo show of artist and filmmaker Christiana Perschon in Vienna.
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Link to exhibition's website
https://dasweissehaus.at/en/exhibition/einzelausstellung-spending-time-holding-space/
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Image credits from left to right and top to bottom
1 • Stille verschieben, 2024. Bildrecht Vienna 2024.
2 • Nursing an idea and a baby are the same not two different acts on simultaneously the same body, 2024. Bildrecht Vienna 2024.
3 • Spending Time, Holding Space. Exhibition View, 2024.
4 • Friedl, 2023.
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Photos : Christiana Perschon