Ruth Novaczek: Retrospective

Ruth Novaczek, *The New World*, 2013, film still.

In Novaczek’s films the boundaries of identity continually reform within an incessant desire to find a direction. Her films and poems map out a very personal landscape, encompassing queer rites of passage, a female gaze and being in and outside of love. Using found footage, aphorism and live action the films are diasporic stand-up, feminist mash-ups, poetic, irreverent musings. For Retrospective, Novaczek presents a selection of recent and older film works produced between 2013 and today.

Shown for the first time in Austria, the films Eat the dust (2019); Crime Scene (2017); Footnote (2016); A woman returns from a journey (2014) and The New World (2013) will play concurrently as an installation, mixing visions, gazes and temporalities.

On the opening night, the artist will perform live in the space, intersecting poetry and improvisation, spoken words and music.

A collection of Novaczek’s poems, Altneu, accompanies the exhibition. The book, inaugurating KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS’ publishing project Wild Seeds, also includes a series of recent photographs by the artist and a text by writer and poet Eileen Myles.

Wild Seeds is designed by FONDAZIONE Europa.

Ruth Novaczek

(b.1956, London, UK) is an artist, filmmaker, performance artist, musician and writer; she has exhibited her experimental, vernacular films and installations nationally and internationally since the 1990s. Her films portray a restless, nomadic autofictional landscape, and an eccentric romantic queer feminism. The fragmented narrative in her films is echoed in her prose and poems. On the margins of academia, teaching as a visiting artist, she has a PhD by practice from the University of Westminster where she’s a visiting research fellow and is on the faculty of the lo-res Transart Institute (in Berlin) and she currently teaches at Birkbeck College, London.

Her work has been shown at galleries and venues including Queer Thoughts, New York, Berlin Arsenal, LUX London, the Kunsthalle New York, Tate Britain, Stuttgart Kunsthalle, Toyota Museum Japan, and in numerous film festivals including Viper Switzerland, Mix NYC, the London Film Festival and Oberhausen, Germany.

ruthnovaczek.com