Susanne M. Winterling

Across the Power of Spaces

Relationships between individualized identities, social power structures, and architecture affect artistic production in multiple ways.

Yet what is the precise nature of these structures and dynamics in detail, both now and in the past? How do the relationships and spheres of influence change, and can they be separated from artistic production? Or isn’t it precisely these obscure influences and conditions that describe the artistic relationships to the identity-producing powers of their time? Are they not founded precisely in this separation? This is especially true of contemporary art, where artistic production also follows the drive to make general social reproduction flexible; the self-conceptualizations of artistic work are based on the constant construction and reconstruction of clearly delineated identities. These, in turn, have
to be asserted, accepted as possible. This makes them negotiable and vulnerable. The attempt to
formulate a position in the face of this tendency toward flexibility, to find an artistic form, means taking a position socially in every single point: whether in gender identity, cultural membership, economic attribution, or the social and architectonic spaces within which these are negotiated.
Susanne M. Winterling

Starting from the notion that artistic production behaves like a rubber band relative to the production
of identity, Susanne M. Winterling examined the anomalies and/or sites of fracture and traces that inevitably arise within these extensions. Winterling writes: “Through examples that take historical, modernist, or modern figures and collectives as the point of departure and consider film as well as psychoanalysis as a fundamental tool, these correlations are to be made perceptible and above all brought into a new form as self-installational, spatially extensive works in various artistic media. It is not an art-historical goal that was the aim, but rather the development of a perspective appropriate to the present. This, in turn, requires a subjective, individual positioning.”

In the 2011 summer semester, Susanne M. Winterling presented her work and working methods in the Film and Culture Theories in Artistic Practice seminar at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Innsbruck, which took place under the direction of Dunja Brötz.

In 2010, Susanne Martha Winterling was awarded the Stipend of the City of Innsbruck at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.