Renate Bertlmann : Discordo Ergo Sum

de Catherine Wood, Hélène Cixous, Beatriz Colomina, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

This year the renowned artist Renate Bertlmann, a pioneer and role model of early feminist performance art, is exhibiting in the Austrian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2019 in Venice. By selecting Renate Bertlmann, curator Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein opted for an artist whose work not only holds a significant position in the history of female performance in Austria, but who also is highly esteemed among the international feminist avant-garde. In presenting Renate Bertlmann, the Austrian Pavilion is dedicated to a female solo exhibition for the first time in its decades-long history. The book under consideration is more than an exhibition catalog; it is an extension of the exhibitions in book form, as the texts by Hélène Cixous, Catherine Wood, Beatriz Colomina, and Lina Streeruwitz offer in-depth discussions, analyses, and discursive explorations of Renate Bertlmann's works. Readers are invited to continue their excursion through Renate Bertlmann's thought and practice in the so-called sourcebook, which offers insights into the artist's virtually inexhaustible archive. Notes, sketches, and other finds from countless diaries and sketchbooks, analytical material such as charts, association cards, sketches of unproduced projects, booths in fictitious exhibitions, texts by authors that have been instrumental to Renate Bertlmann and her artistic work, her own texts about art, her poems, manifestos, and musical scores get to the heart and brain of Bertlmann's 50-year cosmos. Exhibition: Austrian Pavilion 2019, 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (11.05. - 24.11.2019).