Gisèle Vienne
This Causes Consciousness to Fracture
Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
12 September 2024 – 12 January 2025
L’Etang, 2020
Photo: Estelle Hanania
L’Etang, 2020
Photo: Estelle Hanania
L’Etang, 2020
Photo: Estelle Hanania
For the first time in Berlin, the Haus am Waldsee, in collaboration with the Georg Kolbe Museum and Sophiensæle, presents the artistic work of Gisèle Vienne (b. 1976). The Haus am Waldsee is going to showcase a large-scale solo exhibition spanning the entire institution. Over the past twenty-five years, the French-Austrian artist, choreographer, and director has created a complex and idiosyncratic body of work that reconsiders our perceptual frameworks and invents artistic languages in order to pave the way for structural societal change. Gisèle Vienne’s creations, both on stage and within her visual practice, are developed together with dancers and actors, and are often animated by anthropomorphic figures and puppets to explore the sensuality, rage, and creativity of counterculture in all its subversive potential. Through bringing together her philosophical influences and formal experiences, her work on stage and otherwise seeks to overturn dominant orders and to invent new artistic forms that explore the possibility of encoding the world differently.
Vienne predominantly works on the stage where she expands her practice by incorporating dolls and life-size puppets, mainly representing adolescents. Her use of puppets, considered in the field of figurative sculpture, unfold a decidedly political dimension in relation to the body as a place where culturally and socially constructed systems of perception can be questioned, criticised, and possibly dislodged. By staging the longing and the fears of a crisis-bound youth, her protagonists’ sensibilities are validated in all their political and societal aspects. Gisèle Vienne’s work involves itself in the battle that rages against standardising, authoritarian forces which weigh heavy on the mind and body. ‘Gisèle Vienne embarks on a meticulous, determined and challenging quest. She investigates the framework of intelligibility that governs our gestures, our imaginary and our collective myths, our identities, our morals, and, ultimately, social order.’
The exhibition assembles the life-size puppets created by Vienne over the last twenty years in a carefully composed installation alongside a body of photographs by the artist, portraying the range and types of dolls. Staged in the guise of a puppet play the presentation is developed purposefully for the architecture of the Haus am Waldsee, where layers of language, sound, and movement are pitched against the silence and immobility of the exhibited dolls. Here, Vienne creates a field of tension between self-determination and heteronomy, questioning moments that cause consciousness to fracture. The title, This Causes Consciousness to Fracture, is borrowed from a track from the album Patterns of Consciousness (Important Records, 2017) by Caterina Barbieri, Gisèle Vienne’s collaborator for the stage piece Extra Life (2023).
This causes consciousness to fracture, 2024
Photo: Estelle Hanania
This causes consciousness to fracture, 2024
Photo: Estelle Hanania
The exhibition is part of a collaboration between the Haus am Waldsee, the Georg Kolbe Museum, and Sophiensæle, Berlin. All three institutions bring Vienne’s work, in all its complexity, to the city as part of Berlin Art Week 2024 and present different approaches to her multifaceted practice, located between photography, sculpture and installation, film, choreography, and theatre. Haus am Waldsee opens This Causes Consciousness to Fracture on 11 September 2024 (the exhibition runs from 12 September 2024 to 12 January 2025). At Georg Kolbe Museum the exhibition, presenting Viennes work in the context of female avantgarde artists, opens on 12 September 2024 (the exhibition runs from 13 September 2024 to 16 March 2025). The film Jerk by Gisèle Vienne will be shown as part of an artist talk at Sophiensæle on 15 September 2024. Performances of Crowd are planned for 14, 15, and 16 November 2024.
Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer, and theatre and film director. Since her childhood, she was trained in visual arts by her mother, Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak. She studied dance and music, philosophy, and puppeteering. Over the past twenty years, her work, among them the productions Showroomdummies (2001/2009/2013/2020), I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008), This Is How You Will Disappear (2010), LAST SPRING: A Prequel (2011), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) in collaboration with Puppentheater Halle, Crowd (2017), L’Etang (2021), and EXTRA LIFE (2023, invited to Theatertreffen Berlin 2024), has been touring in Europe, Asia, and America. Vienne has frequently exhibited her photographs and installations in museums, among them the Whitney Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; and the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva. She has published two books: JERK/Through Their Tears with Jonathan Capdevielle, Dennis Cooper, and Peter Rehberg in 2011 and 40 PORTRAITS (2003–2008), in collaboration with Dennis Cooper and Pierre Dourthe in 2012. Her work has led to various publications and the original music of her shows to several albums.
In the framework of the presentations in Berlin, a new publication dedicated to the collaborative work of Gisèle Vienne and Estelle Hanania including texts by Anna Gritz and Elsa Dorlin will be published by Haus am Waldsee together with Spector Books.
[1] Elsa Dorlin, ‘To the Accursed Role We Play: Gisèle Vienne’, Magazine Ruhrtriennale, 2021, online at: https://archiv.ruhrtriennale.de/2021/en/magazine/to-the-accursed-role-we-play-gisele-vienne/62.html.
Curated by Anna Gritz
HAUS AM WALDSEE
Argentinische Allee 30, 14163 Berlin
