Isa Rosenberger

Isa Rosenberger. Shadows, Gaps, Voids at Kunsthaus Graz is Isa Rosenberger’s most comprehensive show to date and features six older works and a new piece, a co-production with Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Together they form the spatial, visual and content framework for the exhibition scenography. The exhibition space becomes the platform for a staging in various scenes, and in the process becomes the scenery itself.

Isa Rosenberger’s artistic interest is historiographical, examining the writing of history, its abridgements, suppressions and rewritings. More than this: her film installation works search for traces that give space and visibility to the hidden, the repressed and the forgotten, often feminist women's history. Rosenberger connects the body knowledge of her female protagonists, both their personal and generation-defining experiences together with socio-political events in the past and present. The latter are closely linked to Jewish culture and history.

Discussions with contemporary witnesses, documentary and fictional modes of narrative, performative approaches and (re-)performances create a network of connections, continuities, interruptions and synchronicities – in short: a multi-perspectival historiography in which gaps and voids are constitutive. Rosenberger ties these in with current issues and discourses: the voluntary or forced migration of people, but also of knowledge, economic crises and critique of capitalism or the creative and self-empowering handling of economic and political adversities. In this way, the present writes itself into the past, and the past becomes alive in the present.

In the film realisation, the artist uses montage: speech, language and visual narrative levels switch, fragment and join up again at other points. This principle – in spatialised form – is transferred to the exhibition. Curtains, plinths, wall panels, furniture and film projections are components of the work and at the same time become structuring elements within the exhibition. The separation between artworks and exhibition display fades away: architecture, work and performance are interlinked.