"Spending Time, Holding Space"

Einzelausstellung von Christiana Perschon, Erste Bank Kunstpreisträgerin 2024

Eröffnung: 10.09.2024, 17 - 22h

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 space means 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 the artist’s practice, along with listening, noticing and being affected by others. In her works, she builds a framework for her protagonists to appear, interact and create moving images together with her camera – to which she confers its own agency.

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.

Spending Time, Holding Space is the first solo show of artist and filmmaker Christiana Perschon in Vienna, taking place from 11 September until 19 October 2024 at DAS WEISSE HAUS.

This year’s award is presented in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Ottawa and the SAW Centre Ottawa.

Our special thanks go to the team of Erste Bank Sponsoring Program for the cooperation and support and to the jury of Erste Bank Art Award 2024!