Lisl Ponger: Semiotic Ghosts - Book Presentation and Film Program

Lisl Ponger is one of the distinctive voices of contemporary Austrian art. With her work, she skillfully and relentlessly shifts the boundaries between photography and film. In our present day, when images can no longer be trusted, Ponger's work points to processes behind the surface: to ideologies, institutions, and associated viewing habits. Her gaze is analytical, yet never detached, revealing the contradictions of representation. In doing so, she does not shy away from critically questioning the role of authorship, scientificity, aesthetic and social representation. Her works move in the field of tension between self-image and external image, identity, history and gender dynamics, becoming conversation partners that ask questions rather than provide answers. (Elisabeth Streit)

Thursday, December 4 / 6:00 p.m.

Book presentation with Lisl Ponger
Discussion and film clips
Lisl Ponger in conversation with editors Elisabeth Streit and Dietmar Schwärzler

In Lisl Ponger's works, cultural stereotypes are dismantled and the power of images over others is questioned. Over the course of decades of consistent work with photography, film, and installation, the artist has developed a characteristic “Ponger perspective” on the world. Elisabeth Streit and Dietmar Schwärzler invited 25 scholars, curators, and companions to examine the entire spectrum of Lisl Ponger's artistic and socio-political engagement for the first time. The result of this collaboration between the Film Museum and sixpackfilm is a richly illustrated collection of essays in German and English. It explores Ponger's visual worlds and her visual strategies against the iconographies of injustice.

Lisl Ponger. Semiotische Geister / Semiotic Ghosts is the first in a new series entitled “... eine Art zu denken” (A Way of Thinking) published by Edition Zyphius, a collaboration between the Austrian Film Museum and Vienna-based Mandelbaum Verlag. (T. W.)

Free admission, voluntary contribution (1 euro) to the Kulturpass initiative 

Thursday, December 4, 8:30 p.m.
In the presence of Lisl Ponger

Semiotic Ghosts
Lisl Ponger, La Vida es un Carnival 2021, color, 8min
Lisl Ponger, To Whom It May Concern 2022, color, 7min
Lisl Ponger, Unless you are a Trickster 2023, color, 6min
Lisl Ponger, Imago Mundi 2007, Farbe, 37min. German with English subtitles

At the end of the 2000s, Lisl Ponger tried her hand at “feature film format” for the first time and, with Imago Mundi, explored the discursive possibilities ranging from theater to political activism. Her attempt to create making-of films marked the beginning of a new phase in the artist's work. Whether it's carnival, set during the coronavirus pandemic as a dance of death (complete with baby alligator distance), animals fighting back against their use as animal soldiers, or a trickster creating chaos from which renewal can emerge: Lisl Ponger tells stories in the shortest possible form, which consolidate layer by layer into a concentrated outcry whose echoes do not fade quickly. (E. S.)

Lisl Ponger. Semiotic Ghosts, Elisabeth Streit and Dietmar Schwärzler (eds.), Vienna: Mandelbaum Edition Zyphius 2025.
A collaboration between the Austrian Filmmuseum and sixpackfilm.