NOISY RUPTURES

NOISY RUPTURES: Current animations by Austrian artists

Tricky Women Tricky Realities presents a joyful selection of current animated works by women and/or genderqueer artists from Austria. These six films showcase the playfulness, humor, and experimental spirit of the Austrian animation scene. Together, they offer an insight into the Austrian animation landscape, which has been shaped historically and currently by strong female and/or genderqueer positions. Above all, the films are intended to whet your appetite for Tricky Women Realities 2026!

WO ICH WOHNE/WHERE I LIVE Susi Jirkuff, AT, 2022, 11min

In WO ICH WOHNE (Where I Live), Susi Jirkuff traces the sudden decline of a person not only narratively, but also visually, frame by frame. "Since yesterday, I've been living one floor lower," says the protagonist right at the beginning. But none of the people around her react to this extraordinary circumstance. In Jirkuff's animation, based on a story by Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), the elements of the house develop a life of their own. In addition to the handrail and the wallpaper, the white drawing surface is also affected: Jirkuff's charcoal strokes and the coal dust from Aichinger's text color it gray (because coal is stored in the basement, where the narrator's voice ultimately ends up). As in "Vermessung der Distanz" (2019), Susi Jirkuff is interested not only in the spatiality of the house, but also in the (non-)behavior of fellow human beings. No one asks, "Didn't you live next door to us yesterday?" (Andreas Dittrich)

SIE PUPPT MIT PUPPEN/SHE DOLLS WITH DOLLIES Karin Fisslthaler, AT, 2024, 3min

Portraits from old films and magazines have been appropriated and anonymized: behind punched-out heads, radiant tulips and prickly cacti flicker. The flowers rotate, dance, pulsate. Framed by shiny hair, pearl necklaces and evening gowns or gray uniforms, a botanical fever dream unfolds. In contrast to the vitalistic riot of floral images, the framing is rigid and in black and white. Kurt Schwitters' poem "Sie puppt mit Puppen" (She plays with dolls) from 1944 is heard in the background. Right from the start, it is fragmented, lines tumble back and forth until the words dissolve into the electronic beatbox carpet. Individual words crystallize from the rhythmically fragmented babble. At the end, the short text can be heard in its entirety in chronological order. Karin Fisslthaler's video was created as a visual interpretation of this audio piece by Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern, which transforms Schwitters' poem and takes up his interest in decomposition and deconstruction. (Charlie Bendisch, Friederike Horstmann)

SUBOTOPIC Nikki Schuster, AT, 2023, 7min

In SUBOTOPIC, the viewer’s gaze dives below the water’s surface downwards into ever deeper layers of the underwater world. In morphed single-frame switching, bizarre pictorial plants and insect creatures pass by the viewer. We dive into lightless spaces until we penetrate a surface of light again. Diving deeper and deeper, existing parallel worlds are made visible under water and new utopias are created. Above and below, inside and outside dissolve. A dive into a mystical underwater world where reality and utopia meet.

HAPPY DOOM Billy Roisz, AT, 2023, 4min

2022: A Spaced Out Odyssey. A trip experience that offers precisely those levels of consciousness and their dissolution that are also made possible by the consumption of certain intoxicants. In the mere three minutes of cinematic movement in HAPPY DOOM, I get the impression of falling through the screen into an alternative space, briefly reminded of the material of the screen—its material reality—and at the same time witnessing a journey into the interior of my eye. The boundaries between inside and outside, me and the world, the virtual and the material become permeable, ambiguous, obsolete: I am the origin and object of a gaze, I am actually there and lost, sitting in the cinema and falling through space and time, everything is in flux in an infinite, unending circular motion. (Alejandro Bachmann)

TAKO TSUBO Fanny Sorgo & Eva Pedroza, AT, 2024, 6min

Mr. Ham decides to have his heart removed in order to be relieved of his complicated feelings. The doctor assures him that this is no longer a problem at all in this day and age. However, Ham decides to keep his heart for a while after the removal in order to perhaps understand it a bit better after all. TAKO TSUBO* is an animated, surrealistic reflection on dealing with feelings in a meritocracy.