Re-Constructing the Witch
A conversation with Johanna Braun, Valerie Habsburg, Elke Krasny, Anka Lesniak, and Joulia Strauss
January 30, 2022
The Witch, a 1895 figurative sculpture by Jewish sculptress Teresa Feodorowna Ries, shows a young female witch getting ready for the Sabbath. Getting ready and preparing for, are central to the meaning of this sculpture as are, for our present-day understanding of this figure, the histories of violence, damage, loss, and restitution that are connected to it.
On the occasion of the exhibition "Lost Element. Re-Construction of the Witch" the five artists and theorists, Johanna Braun, Valerie Habsburg, Elke Krasny, Anka Lesniak, and Joulia Strauss gather on Zoom for a public conversation on re-constructing the witch in relation to contemporary struggles connected to memory politics, anthropogenic ruination, political catastrophe, and art and activism preparing for hope-full futures.
On the contributions and the contributors:
Johanna Braun addresses how witchcraft and magic have been increasingly mobilized in contemporary (performance) art and activism to demand (through artistic interventions) political change.
Johanna Braun, an artist-researcher, is lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and guest researcher at the University of Southern California (Winter 2021/2022). Between 2018-2020 she was the Principle Investigator of her postdoctoral research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator”, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund, and situated at UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Vienna. Her academic and artistic research focuses on visual culture, witchcraft activism, (new) hysteria, and performance studies. She has internationally performed, exhibited, published, and has given lectures on various aspects of mass hysteria and witchcraft activism. Most recently she published the edited volumes Performing Hysteria: Image and Imaginations (Leuven University Press, 2020) and Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Valerie Habsburg
Valerie Habsburg addresses the archival precarity of sculpture, The Witch, and the power of precarious, yet insistent counter-narratives emerging from traces, fragments, and broken limbs. Repair, healing, and restitution are part of re-construction.
Valerie Habsburg is an artist and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her works she reflects and processes themes such as memory(s), time and temporality(ies) and their relation to space and place. The archive forms an important basis for her artistic works, which show themselves with the media photography, video, objects and installations. Her works have been shown in various galleries and exhibitions in Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany and Russia. Habsburg works with photography archives. Her specific interest is in personal archives: private family chronicles, documented intimate moments, registered and catalogued individual memories. Since 2019, she does artistic research on the works and life of Jewish sculptor Teresa Feodorowna Ries.
Elke Krasny
Present-day feminists active in political and environmental activism and social reproduction struggles, but also contemporary artists and activist scholars turn to the figure of the witch to find inspiration and strength. The contribution focuses on the historical contours of the witch as a feminist figure embodying epistemic resistance, power of healing, and bodily sovereignty.
Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses questions of ecological and social justice at the present historical conjuncture with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. Together with Angelika Fitz, she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet together (MIT Press, 2019). Her forthcoming book with transcript titled Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care develops a feminist perspective on imaginaries of war and realities of care in pandemic times.
Anka Lesniak
Anka Lesniak will introduce an artistic investigation about the missing hand with shears of “The Witch” and the meaning of this lost part of the sculpture in the context of HIStory, institutions, politics towards women (artists), antisemitism and xenophobia. She will also reflect on possible ways of symbolic re-construction of the "lost element" of the sculpture with the use of transmedia art.
Anka Lesniak, Artist and researcher, the curator of the exhibition “Lost Element. Re-Construction of the Witch“, VBKÖ Vienna. She is interested in feminism, issues related to gender, body, ethnic identity, history, language and memory. She is the author of the book Women disconnected from history. Site-specific artworks on abandoned buildings (2017). In 2019 she received the OeAD grant for the project on Teresa Feodorowna Ries (1866-1956), and was based in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Studio for Post-conceptual Art). She currently heads the Intermedia Studio II at the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland.
Joulia Strauss
As a sculptor and a witch Joulia Strauss praises, in words and with a song, the idea of restitution. In our culture, Maris did not have modernity, sculptures are still totems. So, we can communicate through the sculpture of the witch with the spirit of THE witch. Witch in our culture is called Ovda. She is the main humanoid inhabitant of the forest. It is surely her who until now has succeeded to protect the forest from Putin and his wood-exporting gangster companions.
Joulia Strauss is an artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. She was born in the Soviet Union as Mari, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, and now lives in Berlin and Athens. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings, videos, were presented at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, NY, Tirana Biennale, Oostende Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Wolfsburger, Fraknfurter, Hamburger Kunstvereins, 2nd Athens Biennale, Fourth Moscow Biennale, Kyiv Biennial, Tate Modern, London, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and documenta14.
Joulia Strauss is the founder and organiser of the Avtonomi Akadimia in Athens. Her current practice is focused on creating transindigenous ecofeminist epistemologies.