art

Conni Holzer is a transmedia performance artist, art therapist and artistic researcher from Austria. She studied Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna (AT), Art Therapy at the Academy for Art Therapy Vienna (AT), and completed the MA Performing Public Space at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Tilburg (NL).

In her work, Holzer addresses dominant social norms and structures, starting from individual experience, expanding from the psychological effects to the social origins. She uses art’s therapeutic and activist potential to explore contradictory paradoxical spaces within our minds, society and public spaces. Holzer creates through transmedia art processes, where she moves through various artistic media to explore a topic from different perspectives, with different senses, different materiality and embodied ways of thinking. The processual is central in her work, where she uses painting, drawing, performance, video making, sound making, installations and writing.

FEMonumental Transformance is a transmedia performance art method to transform patriarchal monuments into feminist monumental practices. It had its start in the rural area of Vorarlberg (AT) focusing on the monuments placed there. This ongoing artistic research project was developed during the Master Performing Public Space.

The project experiments with ways to transform patriarchal monuments into feminist monumental practices using performative explorations, experimental movie making and overpainting of performance photographs. The aim here is to detect patriarchal structures and construct publicly alternative, intersectional queer feminist (hooks, Grosz, Ahmed) forms of commemoration and worshipping in their place.

Kuana brengt mi ôm / No one Kills Me – Vol. 2 is a performance about femicides. Every 9 minutes a woman or a girl is killed by her (ex-) partner or by a family member on our planet. The number of killed women in Austria is bigger than the number of killed men per year, with numbers staying the same, while crimes in general decrease. These murders of women and girls are the result of patriarchal structures. They are killed because they are women, because they don’t act according to traditional gender roles. The performance deals with fear, grief and anger about the femicides. The performer’s naked body symbolises the vulnerability and the feeling of being at someone’s mercy. As most femicides happen in the homes of the women, also the Performance takes place in a home.

Holzer explored this topic through the performance (live and as video-installation), overpaintings of performance photographs and a living-room-like installation in exhibitions in Bregenz (A) and Vienna (A).

The female body is restricted in a variety of ways. It is socially and legistlatively regulated, needs to conform to beauty standards, and some parts of it are invisible in our culture. For many women it takes an act of liberation in order for them to perceive their bodies as the wonderlands which they are. Feeling your body, understanding the physical processes within it, reflecting on the way you move in the world – those are acts of liberation. Every single little wonderland that you discover is a liberated (body) part. Reclaim your power

preserve. a performance about losing, finding, touching,collecting and preserving dignity / Bewahre. Eine Performance über das Verlieren, Finden, Berühren, Sammeln und Bewahren von Würde.

If I forget or lose my dignity, where is it? How can I get it back? Is it possible to find and adorn the dignity of others? Where has all the lost dignity gone? Who preserves it? These questions are the starting point of the performance. It is about finding, saving and preserving dignity and giving it back to its owners. The performance enquires into the possibilities of physical contact in times of social distancing, about our ways of connecting with and encountering

each other. It is part of the project Dignity and Touchability in Times of Social Distancing from the Max Himmelheber-Stiftung and Würdekompass e.V.

The premiere of the performance took place in a public space in front of a church on a hill overlooking the Rhine valley in Austria and the Swiss mountains. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, there were no visitors allowed and the performance was streamed online.

projects

workshops

FEMonumental Transformance

Transforming Schiller

Zuhause im Patriarchat / at home in patriarchy

Befreiungsakt / Act of Liberation

My body is a wonderland

bewahre / preserve