Dec 15, 6 pm
Judith Fischer
Liminal Creatures
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Based on my intensive artistic and theoretical research and investigation into vampires & vampirism,1 horror films & haunted houses in literature and film,2 I am currently working on and with the theme of liminal creatures.
Liminal creatures are neither here nor there; they are neither one thing nor another, but instead find themselves betwixt and between positions fixed by law, by tradition, by convention and ceremony. (...) The liminal state is hence often equated with death, with being in the womb, with invisibility, darkness, bisexuality, with the wilderness and with a solar or lunar eclipse. Liminal creatures, like neophytes in rites of initiation or puberty, can be symbolically represented as creatures that possess nothing. (Victor Turner: «Das Ritual. Struktur und Anti-Struktur». 2005, original 1969, p. 95) In the female artists’ book «SOME: women houses phantoms» (Schlebrügge Editor, 2010) I inquire into the liminal state and the liminal creature, including in the methodological and structural sense as well: What happens when we actually work artistically in a transdisciplinary, subdisciplinary or dedisciplinary manner? Who would then be our potential readers?
The liminal is an in-between state, heterotopic, chronotopic. A sojourn in «liminality» (Victor Turner) is only meant to be transitory, a transition between one state and another, a short stay in an unpropertied condition, and a voluntary renunciation of identity. What happens when we think of liminality as a zone where we can linger, which we can (mentally) enter in order to withdraw for a time from the «structural relationships of the world.» (Turner)? How do we then return?
1 A selection: «Predator & Prey: Cryptic Presentation,» Akademie Schloß Solitude, Stuttgart/D, 2004; «I saw her. I saw her,» Galerie Alkatraz/Metelkova, Ljubljana/SL, 2003; «VAMPIRIC,» ig bildende kunst/ Vienna, 2002.
2 A selection: «FACTFICTION: what is a ghost?,» Unortnung/Vienna 2009, «ABWESEND,» Ragnarhofkeller/Vienna 2008; «Haunted Spaces,« ACC Galerie Weimar/D, 2007; «Report from the Ghost City» ATA Artists Television Access, San Francisco/USA, 2007; «transmission,» kunstpavillon innsbruck, 2006; «i am disappearing inch by inch into
this house,» kunsthaus mürzzuschlag/ Steirischer Herbst 2005.
Judith Fischer was born in 1967 in Hallstatt, Austria, and today lives in Vienna. She works as author and artist conceptually, theoretically and artistically in the fields and the contexts of literature, philosophy, film and visual art. Media
& communication and philosophy studies in Vienna. Post-academic fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands, from 1999–2001 (art theory; vampiric reading & writing). Summer trimester at the Bauhaus Kolleg in Dessau, Germany (complex city: art in public space, 2000). Artist in residence at the Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart (literature, 2004). Artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck (Researcher Visual Arts, with Claudia Hardi, 2005). 2008–2011 doctorate in philosophy and work on dissertation «Lesende. In Lektüre versunken. Das Bild des Lesens als Ort des Liminalen.» with Elisabeth von Samsonow, Chair of Philosophical and Historical Anthropology of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.