The Gallery

At the start are close-ups, they are blurred. Eyes, mouths, noses, hands enter the picture. Scattered, nearly puzzle-like. The tone is also minimal and offers no clues as to what we are actually looking at; we hear paper, glass. We grope in the dark, it is silent. Step by step—after a fade-in of the title—the camera offers more context: the paper that is being written on, the writing, the drying of the paper. It seems as though we are reminded of Japanese or Chinese calligraphy: a ritual that accompanies production of an artwork. Calligraphy, a strongly expressive art form focusing on the development of individual expression within a specified frame. Cordula Rieger’s THE GALLERY documents the eponymous action by the FLINT collective (women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, and trans* people) femplak_wien (feminist posters Vienna). Members of the collective focus on their individual experiences of sexualized violence—together and in solidarity. What was forced into silence for years is written down and exhibited verbatim. This allows a larger picture of omnipresent gender-specific violence to emerge in public space (namely, under the Reichsbrücke, and also virtually on femplak’s Instagram channel). The protagonists arrive at their own specific expression, first by writing, letter for letter, page for page, then also acoustically. They narrate from off-camera, one story becomes many that overlap and flow into a polyphonic choir. THE GALLERY carefully compiles the puzzle pieces—faces, stories, voices—and constructs the larger, collective context. (Sylvia Szely)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt