Lisl Ponger

de Lisl Ponger, James Clifford

Professione: Fotografa' (Profession: Photographer) is the title the artist chose for her exhibition, alluding to Michelangelo Antonioni?s 1975 motion picture 'Professione: Reporter' (released in English as The Passenger), a thriller exploring epistemological problems, questions of responsibility, and the relation between artist and work. A photographer by training, Ponger launched her career as an artist in the early 1970s, working with photography and film to scrutinize patterns apparent in the displays in ethnological museums and representations of alien as well as familiar cultures that have persisted since the nineteenth century. Photography was the medium through which, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans transmitted the ?new? world?the foreign?into their homes and at once asserted their supremacy over it. In photographs such as Teilnehmende Beobachterin (Participant Observer, 2016), the artist uses theatrical staging and exaggeration to showcase tenacious stereotypes, racisms, and scopic constructions. Under the label MuKul, the name of her own fictional museum, Ponger also collects items of Western everyday culture and trinkets from tourist souvenir shops that attest to how people engage with foreign cultures.00Exhibition: Museum der Moderne, Rupertinum, Salzburg, Austria (01.12.2018 - 24.03.2019).