Constanze Ruhm


Constanze Ruhm is an Austrian filmmaker, screenwriter, artist, author, professor, and curator. Her works include films, videos, installations, photographs, texts, and digital projects.
She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 1996, she has been teaching internationally as a professor of film and video art. In 2006, she became a tenured professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Ruhm lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

Education

Ruhm began studying visual media design with Peter Weibel at the Academy of Applied Arts in 1987.
In the early 1990s, she moved with Weibel to the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she became increasingly exposed to film and media theory discourses from Germany and France. During this time, she worked as a research assistant for artists such as Dara Birnbaum and Matt Mullican. She received her diploma from the Academy of Applied Arts in 1993, while continuing to work at the Städelschule until 1994.

Career

Ruhm spent the year of 1995-96 working on projects in New York. In 1996/97, Ruhm was a visiting professor for visual media at the Offenbach am Main College of Design.
In 1998, she received the Schindler Scholarship from the Museum of Applied Arts and as a result spent a year as artist-in-residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 1999 to 2001, she was Vice President of the Vienna Secession.
From 2000 to 2003, Ruhm worked at the in Stuttgart, curating projects with Fareed Armaly.
In 2005/2006, she was appointed professor of film and video at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Since 2006, she has held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in the Department of Art and Digital Media.
From 2007 to 2011, alongside her work in Vienna, she was an adjunct professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2017, she founded the queer feminist concept choir Mala Sirena with musician Florian Paul Ebner.
In 2023, the Austrian Film Museum dedicated a retrospective to Ruhm's film and video work.

Ruhm's style, technique and themes

In her artistic work, Ruhm explores film, other media, and archives, as well as feminist historiography.
She often accompanies her films with installations that expand on the films' ideas, themes and references.

Early digital work

Ruhm's initial work was in digital art: at the time she was working with Weibel, Birnbaum and Mullican—creating 3D environments for the latter—it was a field that "appeared unbelievably promising and exciting." The culmination of this period in her work was her collaboration with on an installation for the Venice Biennale of 1995. But shortly after this project, her interest in narrative cinema came to the fore, though still filtered through her background in digital art, as she reworked and re-envisioned the presuppositions of the earlier form by means of the new medium.
"Since the late 1990s, work has been characterized mainly by references to certain films." Apartment, while still a digital piece, explicitly evokes a classic film of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le mépris), foregrounding "the representation of female characters within the cosmology of this male-dominated auteur cinema." In Ruhm's reworking of the breakup between the characters played by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli,

A move to working with actors and scripted features; the "seven characters"

In 2001, Ruhm started the process of moving "to real, analogue space, to work with real people, with actors.". This provided a better match with her literary background: "y works develop not least from a writing practice, from text, and through narrative storytelling, or rather through the script." But one last digital work, A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight, named after a Joyce poem, served as a bridge between the digital period and the shift toward working with actors. Like Apartment, A Memory is built upon a digital reconstitution of a set from a narrative feature, in this case Irvin Kershner's Eyes of Laura Mars. But the narration of Ruhm's work is based on an assemblage of the dialogue of female characters from that film as well as from several other films—what Ruhm calls her "matrix films." In the decade to come, she will return regularly to these characters and films in her projects. In addition to the character of Laura Mars played by Faye Dunaway in Kershner's film, these characters include:
A Memory exists both as a standalone 26-minute film and as an installation. In a review of the installation, Michael Hall noted that Ruhm "sifted through this popular suspense film and eliminated nearly all the pertinent information, except for the elements that most interested her leaving an obscure digital picture that looked neither real nor fake." In this process of "emptying out" the original film, "Ruhm's main concern centers on how the space of cinematic narratives and the stories invented by others can add to the understanding of our own social reality."
X Characters / REAL was Ruhm's first film with on-screen actors. Here all seven of the characters appear in the flesh and interact with each other. Ruhm worked out the script in a collaborative process with seven friends, each focusing on one of the main roles. The film was shot in Berlin, with help from colleagues such as Harun Farocki, a fellow professor at the Academy in Vienna. In the film the seven characters,
Ruhm had originally planned on naming the series of films X Characters in Search of an Author, alluding to the Pirandello play. As for the "X" with which the titles of this film and the two next ones begin, normally it "is used in theater and film production to mark the position of an actor, and is applied with chalk or tape to a usually black-painted wooden floor. In her films, Constanze Ruhm turns the 'X' into a protagonist, into a transmitter between character and space."
X Characters is also her first film in which rehearsals play a key on-screen role. The exploration of the world of rehearsals—the postures, the gestures, the struggles, the shifts in identity—will become an integral part of nearly all of her films up to the present day. "The rehearsal as form and method forms the basis for most of my works."
X NaNa / Subroutine, in which Farocki has a small role, was the first in an intended series of standalone films about each of the seven characters—thus a "subroutine" of the main "program" featuring all seven. X NaNa imagines Godard's Nana working in a record shop while participating in hacking operations and interrogating her creator via an Internet chat screen. The soundtrack echoes her name through judicious selections from various pop songs.
Ultimately the only other film made in the series of standalone films was X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String, centered on Giuliana. Here the "X", drawn on a piece of black cloth used in film shoots and called a "flag," figures physically and prominently as Giuliana, now an actress, not only plays herself but also Bree and Hari, "creating a kaleidoscopic fragmentation of identities." She is often obliged to act with the flag as her only partner. The director, also a woman, is a relatively overbearing, unfriendly presence, often criticizing Giuliana's acting. Only Nana, who has become a script supervisor in this film, tries to give Giuliana constructive advice.
Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot was the last of Ruhm's films to feature any of the seven characters. Here, those remaining are Hari, Nana, and Giuliana, who has become "Julian" and is played by a male actor. Although it is not presented as such, the film could be seen as centered on Hari this time, as
The other characters therefore emulate Hari's behavior in Solaris where she attempts more than once to commit suicide but is unsuccessful, being a mere projection from the surface of the planet Solaris.
FilmNanaGiulianaAlmaBreeHariLaura MarsRachel
A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
X Characters / REAL
X NaNa / Subroutine
X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String
Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot—as "Julian"

Partnerships with co-directors

''Cold Rehearsal''

The end of the period centered on the seven characters inaugurated a new one where Ruhm worked in collaboration with other directors. Again, a film bridges the divide between the two periods: in this case, it is Cold Rehearsal , co-directed by Christine Lang. The two main characters are Anna, clearly based on Anna Karina and as such a callback to Nana from the earlier films, and Hans, played by the same actor who played Julian in the previous film and evoking a name Godard used to pseudonymously sign several articles of film criticism.
The film begins, however, with three figures who Ruhm has identified as dead actresses formerly in Hans's films and marooned in a realm of detritus—a patch of land with folding chairs and a tent—that she calls "hell." But she has also said that the characters from the earlier series "find themselves together again," implying that the actresses are continuations or interpolations of the seven earlier characters. The actresses exact punishment on Hans by imagining him as a janitor on a talk show, made to appear on it as a guest with Anna. Through a process of redoubling he is also forced to witness the events in the talk show studio with two other instances of Anna and himself.
Other elements connect Cold Rehearsal to the earlier series: some of the actors ; a sardine can; shovels for digging graves and knocking people unconscious; and the male character explaining that he is undergoing an identity crisis. "The film explores forms of female representation and the autonomy of female film characters as opposed to their male writers and directors." The dialogue in the film serves as "hidden instructions for the plot as well as its interpretation, thereby exposing the cinematic illusion -- in a very Brechtian sense -- by laying bare the modes of production." Ruhm has reiterated this lineage of her work: "By showing the contrived aspect of fiction, I am working in the Brechtian tradition, so to speak."

''Panoramis Paramount Paranormal''

Panoramis Paramount Paranormal, co-directed by Emilien Awada, continues the connection with Godard and Karina. The film starts at Le Panoramis, an apartment complex in the Paris suburbs that was once the site of the, the French division of Paramount. Godard had shot scenes from A Woman Is a Woman at these studios.
However, Ruhm saw this film as the beginning of a "new cycle" where "the form has become much more open and essayistic." Indeed, the film is less dominated by on-screen characters and features long passages of the surroundings of Le Panoramis with only ambient sound and the occasional passerby.
Alongside, actors from Ruhm's previous films rehearse passages from Marcel Carné's Juliette, or Key of Dreams, a film shot at the Saint-Maurice studios. They alternate between French and German, an allusion to the former practice of filming versions of films in multiple languages on the same sets with different directors and lead actors. Again, this was a practice associated with these studios.
The "paranormal" element of the film comes from two ghosts who prolong in a sense the role played in the earlier films by characters existing beyond their original films, or dead actresses imposing plotlines from their place in hell. For Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, the film "examines the role of cinema in the production of memory." She then quotes an unpublished text by Ruhm: "What form does the work against oblivion have to assume, and how can you live in peace with the specters, and should one even wish for it? Derrida responds that one cannot do anything but learn to live with the phantoms ."

The "Italian period"

In 2012
Schulte Strathaus invited Ruhm to participate in "Living Archive -- Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice," a long-term project of the Berlin Arsenal "in which artists are encouraged to appropriate and rework the films and footage
stored in vaults."
Here, Ruhm encountered the film Anna by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli. Schulte Strathaus has suggested that "it may have caught her eye because of its title: Anna, like Anna Karina ." Jan Lumholdt describes it as a "three-hour-plus cinéma vérité piece hot on video in 1972" that "portrays a 16-year-old homeless drug addict who is eight months pregnant, discovered by the directors in central Rome and intimately explored, possibly also exploited, throughout the movie."
On the basis of the Grifi/Sarchielli film, Ruhm created Gli appunti di Anna Azzori / Uno specchio che viaggia nel tempo . But here again, as with Ruhm's earlier works, we have the theme of the character rebelling against her representation. In her article on Ruhm's film, Marina Pavido imagines Anna's thoughts: "What do these men want from her? Why do they film her? Why do they laugh when they talk about her in her absence?"
We also have examples of Ruhm's predilection for revealing the "reverse shot" of what is shown, or what was "left on the cutting room floor." The "notes" of the title did not really exist, except in a slip of the tongue by one of the directors in a moment that was cut out of the original film;
Ruhm provides them through "Anna's" voiceover. In another outtake of the original film, Ruhm discovered Anna's last name, which is never mentioned in the finished product whereas all the other members of the crew were duly credited with their full names.
Ruhm's discovery of Anna "prompted her to undertake studies in the history of the Italian feminism of the 1970s."
Around the same time, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, which had presented a solo exhibition of Ruhm's work featuring Apartment in their 20er Haus space in 1998, renewed their interest in her work by proposing another collaboration. "In this instance, she delved into the history of the women's movement in Italy and discovered the Italian writer and art critic Carla Lonzi, who passed away too early."
While doing research for Gli appunti di Anna Azzori Ruhm had come across the Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Rome, and the herSTORY archive located there.
On the basis of its resources, she developed La strada più lunga, first a series of photographs and then an installation. She later incorporated the photographs into the exhibition Come una pupilla al variare della luce
at the Belvedere, which also featured screenings of Gli appunti di Anna Azzori.
The research incorporated into La strada, Come une pupilla and another installation, A Shard is a Fragment of a Life, found filmic form in Ruhm's most recent feature, È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia . Here she combines her exploration of the work of Lonzi—and the Rivolta Femminile group that Lonzi co-founded—with a look back at the Précieuses, "a group of proto-feminist activists"
in 17th century France. Molière parodied this movement in his plays Les précieuses ridicules and Les femmes savantes.
At one point in her film, Ruhm imagines an encounter between Lonzi and Armande.
Many sections of È a questo punto are accompanied only by an ambient soundscape: this is in particular the case for reenactments of paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi. The film is thus a development of the "open and essayistic" direction that Ruhm has pursued since Panoramis. But Godard has not been forgotten: the restaged paintings recall similar tableaux in Passion, and there are several images of hands reaching out to each other, a motif seen in Nouvelle Vague and Goodbye to Language among others. Unlike Godard's films, however, no men participate in these tableaux, and the women involved are staging themselves, imagining their own representations. The film also features archival footage of feminist demonstrations in Italy in the 1970s. Sight and Sound listed it as one of the best video essays of 2024.

Works

Filmography

  • 1998: Apartment
  • 1999: Evidence
  • 1999: ID Remix
  • 1999/2005: Travelling / Plan 234 / Extérieur Nuit
  • 2001: A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
  • 2003-04: X Characters / REAL
  • 2004: X NaNa / Subroutine
  • 2007: X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String
  • 2010: Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot
  • 2011-12: Kalte Probe
  • 2012: Trailer Park
  • 2014-16: Panoramis Paramount Paranormal
  • 2015: Comparing Local Spectres
  • 2019: Gli appunti di Anna Azzori / Uno specchio che viaggia nel tempo
  • 2020: Pearls Without a String -- Trailer
  • 2020: Pearls Without a String
  • 2023: Dark Mirrors Turning Brighter
  • 2024: ''È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia ''

Installations

  • 2013: Replay: ANNA
  • 2021: La strada più lunga
  • 2023: A Shard is a Fragment of a Life
  • 2024: ''A Woman's Work is Never Done''

Photographic works

  • 1993: Un Coup De Dés, series of photographs / 3D-objects based on Mallarmé's poem
  • 1997-98: Day for Night, series of digital photographs : "10:45", "Cendrier", "Surdité", "Scaffold"
  • 1999: Off, series of six digital photographs : "Suburbia," "Desert," "," "Swamp," "Two Suns," "Kiss"
  • 1999: Evidence, series of digital photographs : "", "Hut", "Terror", "Hangar"
  • 2001-02: A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight, series of four photographs
  • 2008: Renewal of Perspective: La Difficulté d'Être, series of 24 photographs, 37 x 25 cm, color
  • 2013: La Difficulté d'Une Perspective: A Life of Renewal, series of 22 photographs, variable dimensions, color
  • 2016: Panoramis Paramount Paranormal
  • 2021: La strada più lunga, series of 59 analogue photographs, 41 cm x 28,5 cm
  • 2024: A Woman's Work Is Never Done, series of 24 analogue photographs, 40 x 50 cm, b/w baryta prints

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions -- 1980s-1990s

  • 1987: Cultura Digitalis, Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna
  • 1988: Samples, Skala, Vienna
  • 1992: Découvertes, Grand Palais, Paris
  • 1992: Visual Communications Lab, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
  • 1992: CVC -- Computer Video Camera, Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna
  • 1992: Die Idee einer Sammlung -- 20 Jahre Galerie Grita Insam, Dorotheum, Vienna
  • 1992: On Justifying the Hypothetical Character of Art and Its Non-Identicality in the Object World, Galerie Tanja Grunert, Cologne
  • 1993: Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt, Institut für Neue Medien an der Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main
  • 1993: Photosynthese,, Hamburg
  • 1993: Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt II, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems
  • 1993: Keimfreie Wesen befehlen mir die Galerie keimfrei zu halten, Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna
  • 1993: Gedanken, Skizzen, Entwürfe, Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich
  • 1993: Computerkünstler, Munich
  • 1993: Transparenz,, Feldkirch, Austria
  • 1994: Translucent Writings, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY / USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida
  • 1994: Lokalzeit: Wiener Künstler im Spiegel des Unbehagens, Kunstraum Strohal, Vienna / Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana / Fondazione Querini, Venice
  • 1995: D. O. G. Radio, Internet radio project
  • 1995: Auf den Leib geschrieben, Kunsthalle, Vienna
  • 1995: , Galerie Martin Janda / Raum für Aktuelle Kunst, Vienna
  • 1995: Self Construction, mumok, Vienna
  • 1995: Raum annehmen IV, Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna
  • 1996: Balance.akte, Niederösterreichische Landesgalerie, Vienna / Kunsthalle, Krems
  • 1996: V6 -- We Six, Galerie Brasilica, Vienna
  • 1996: Jenseits von Kunst / Beyond Art, Ludwig Museum, Budapest
  • 1996: Film Stills, Galerie Grita Insam, Guadalajara
  • 1996: Co właściwie sprawia, że dzisiejsze miasta są tak odmienne, tak seksy? , BWA Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna /, Łódź
  • 1996: Schrägspuren: Tage zeitgenössischer Videokunst in Klagenfurt, Haus der Architektur, Klagenfurt
  • 1996: Rom suchen -- Artisti Austriaci a Roma, Palazzo Braschi / Museo di Roma, Rome
  • 1996: Dress, Galleria Planita, Rome
  • 1996: Habitus, Abito, Abitare, Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
  • 1996: Out of the Dark, Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York
  • 1997: 10 Jahre Trabant, Galerie Trabant, Vienna
  • 1997: Freeze Frame, Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna
  • 1997: Time Is A Man -- Space Is A Woman, Galleria Viafarini, Milan
  • 1997: Jenseits von Kunst / Beyond Art, Neue Galerie, Graz
  • 1998: sincerely yours -- Videoart in Austria, Municipal Gallery, Sofia
  • 1998: There Might be a Place Where One Goes to Feel Better, MAK Center, Los Angeles
  • 1998: Positionen österreichischer Gegenwartskunst / positionen hedendaagse oostenrijkse kunst,, Knokke-Heist, Belgium
  • 1998: Die österreichische Vision / A Visão Austriaca / The Austrian Vision / La visión austriaca, mumok, Vienna / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon / Denver Art Museum, Denver / Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
  • 1998: Interactus V, Accademia d'Ungheria, Rome
  • 1998: Bestandsaufnahme Sehen, transmediale, Berlin
  • 1999: Richtung Museumsquartier -- Die neue Sammlung, mumok, Vienna
  • 1999: Mars, Post Gallery, Los Angeles
  • 1999: D.A.CH.com, Galerie Krinzinger at Benger Park, Bregenz
  • 1999: Das Jahrhundert der Frauen, Kunstforum, Vienna
  • 1999: Punkt Linie Fläche Raum: Abstrakte Fotografie aus den Beständen der Österreichischen Fotogalerie Rupertinum Salzburg,, Vienna
  • 1999: D.A.CH.com, Galerie Krinzinger im Semperdepot, Vienna
  • 1999: Junge Kunst: Aus der Sammlung Morgenbesser, Kunstverein Horn, Horn, Austria

Group exhibitions -- 2000s

Group exhibitions -- 2010s-2020s

Curatorial projects

  • 1999: Hotel Utopia, Summerstage Festival, Vienna
  • 2001: Inextinguishable Fire / Traces of a Staging: Harun Farocki, Olaf Metzel, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, haus.0 program, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart
  • 2001: Economy of Desire, Neue Galerie / Steirischer Herbst, Graz
  • 2002: The Other Side: Missing Link, Wien 1970–1980, haus.0 program, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart
  • 2002: Wendelien van Oldenborgh / heaven's gift, MAK / CAT Contemporary Art Tower, Vienna
  • 2003: , Secession, Vienna
  • 2003: How We Got Into Pictures, ZKM, Karlsruhe, and haus.0 program, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart
  • 2003: Laura Cottingham: , Medienwerkstatt, Vienna
  • 2004: Fate of Alien Modes, ZKM, Karlsruhe
  • 2006: Cinema Is Not A Bad School, Merz Akademie, Stuttgart
  • 2008: Mimétisme, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin
  • 2012: Keine Zeit, 21er Haus, Vienna
  • 2013: Positions in Experimental Films & Video: Familienfilme, University of the Arts, Berlin
  • 2013: Proben aufs Exempel, mumok, Vienna
  • 2014: For the Birds, Kunsthalle, Vienna
  • 2015: You’ve Seen Me Before: Between Appropriation and Déjà-vu, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
  • 2015: Blühendes Gift, mumok, Vienna
  • 2016: Laura Mulvey: Feminismus und/im Kino, 1. mumok Kino, Vienna
  • 2016: Putting Rehearsals to the Test / La répétition mise à l’épreuve, / Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University / SBC Gallery / Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montreal
  • 2017: Erkennen und Verfolgen, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
  • 2017: Jene Tage, topkino, Vienna
  • 2018: Casting a Shadow, mumok and mumok Kino, Vienna
  • 2022: Raise and Unraise Your Voices! Choirs in Moving Images, mumok Kino, Vienna
  • 2022: La Lotta Non È Ancora Finita, Filmmuseum Vienna

Film festival screenings

As author

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As editor

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Analysis

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Reviews

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Interviews

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Exhibition catalogs

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Awards

Works cited

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