The initial idea to make a portrait of Charles Blondin, the famed tightrope walker and ropedancer of the 19th century, developed into a reflection of and fascination of the abyss and the abyssal.
Writer Anna Kim's lecture retraces the life of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart (née Edith Suschitzky 1908, in Vienna, died 1973 in Brighton), who worked as a Soviet agent and photographed workers and street children from Vienna and London to give a face to poverty and social disadvantage.
It is fear – not anxiety – that makes me dizzy these days.
The scholarship programme In the Field overcomes national borders and brought together 15 emerging artists and cultural workers from a radius of 300 kilometres around Vienna for an intense exchange of knowledge and practices.
How does an artist live and work in isolation? How can he/she follow up on exhibition commitments? What kind of artistic strategies should be developed in order to maintain a presence and contact with the public in this situation? What would then be the role of the curator, and of the institution in general, in extreme situations where mobility is imperiled?
Can dizziness be a resource? What remains after unsettledness and disorientation? And how can we see communities find their balance in uncertain situations? Particularly now, in times of ubiquitous invocations of global crisis, these questions of collective balancing and balancing collectives are more relevant than ever.
