Constanze Ruhm
Constanze Ruhm is an internationally renowned artist, filmmaker, author, and curator whose diverse practice transcends the boundaries between film, media art, and theoretical reflection. After studying Media Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Institute for New Media at Städelschule Frankfurt am Main under Peter Weibel, she developed an internationally recognized artistic and theoretical practice.
Since 2006, she has held a professorship in Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As a curator, her significant projects include "FATE OF ALIEN MODES" at the Vienna Secession (2003) and "PUTTING REHEARSALS TO THE TEST" in Montreal (2016). Her works are regularly presented at renowned international festivals including the Berlinale, FID Marseille, Essay Film Festival London, Diagonale, and Viennale.
From a consistently feminist perspective, Ruhm examines the complex relationships between time-based media formats and representations of women. Her work deconstructs patriarchally shaped histories and theories, focusing particularly on rehearsal processes and casting formats as artistic procedures that question hegemonic forms of representation and develop alternative feminist performativities.
Ruhm develops innovative feminist strategies in dealing with found material to discover lost, excluded, and suppressed voices of women. Her works, situated between essay, fiction, and documentation, fundamentally question patriarchal narratives by extracting female film characters from male-dominated narrative structures and developing them into independent, complex subjects.
Film theorist Christa Blümlinger calls Ruhm's practice "film-related archive art" – an explicitly feminist approach that breaks up patriarchal correlations of cinema and media art. Ruhm is considered one of the most important representatives of critical, feministically grounded media art in the German-speaking world.
EDUCATION
Visual Media Design, University of Applied Art
Vienna, Austria
New Media, Staedelschule, Academy of Fine Arts
Frankfurt, Germany
JURY
Veit Goerner
Isabelle Graw
Peter Kogler
Peter Noever
Lebbeus Woods
