Eva Egermann

Eva Egermann "Band Rehearsal" Videostills, Vienna 2014

Takes on the Crip Magazine

In her research-based practice, Egermann works with oppositional practices, assimilations, social movements and pop cultures linked to deviance, abnormality, illness and disability. She works with examples from various times and places, which trigger resistance, irritation or contradiction within aesthetic representations of the undamaged. A huge range of materials can be found in her artistic projects – restaged, revised (e.g. in the form of a newspaper) – or during band practice.

The Crip Magazine is a self-published magazine and a collection of materials on crip themes, art and cultural production, and representations opposing the conditions of normality/abnormality. It encompasses contributions by artists and authors about the crip movement, outcast-nights or disability in subcultural, left-wing and queer contexts; experimental images and texts like the extraterrestrial song text, excentric spoken pieces, the Cosmic Creatures or uncanny images on “feeling bad”.

The magazine is concerned with crip pop culture, art and radical social movements, with pain as its theme, and it opens up a transformative perspective on body issues and physical social relationships. The idea that writing is a technique of the cyborg, as Donna Haraway put it, has been adopted. Cyborgs fight against perfect communication, against the one “code” that translates and transfers every meaning perfectly. That is why cyborgs insist on noise and make a plea for impairment.

The second issue of the Crip Magazine forms the starting point for Egermann’s work in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. It offers an opportunity to discuss the magazine’s contents but also to take them up and develop further related work. What can a magazine be? How is it composed? And what does an editorial office look like? In the course of the fellowship, the editorial office will be realized in many different ways in varying scenarios. This debate will make it possible to regard context, genesis and process as imaginative. Sequences will emerge, showing (fictive) editorial meetings. They will deal with the media world and conditions of normality as well as the essential theses of “Crip Theory”.

Eva Egermann (*1979 in Vienna, Austria, grew up in the Burgenland) is an artist living in Vienna. She has worked within a wide range of media and collaborations (e.g. with Manoa Free University). Besides numerous artistic projects, she has produced publications (e.g. Regime. Wie Dominanz organisiert und Ausdruck formalisiert wird or Class Works) and projects as curator (e.g. 2 or 3 Things we’ve learned. Intersections of Art, Pedagogy and Protest or On Uncanny States and Bodies). She was part of the research group of Model House. Mapping Transcultural Modernisms, Visiting Researcher at U.C. Berkeley in the winter semester 2014/15, and is writing her doctorate as part of the PhD-in-Practice-Programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work was awarded the Theodor Körner Prize 2015 for Science and Art, and endorsed in the category Interdisciplinarity in the context of the Outstanding Artist Award 2016.