SALON REAL / VIRTUAL 9# Salon: Ines Rieder: Her Conceptual World
June 19 – September 02, 2021
Opening Date for the Real & Virtual Projects: June 19, 2021
Talks & Performance: June 19 & 20, 2021
galerie michaela stock, Schleifmühlgasse 18, 1040 Wien
Vienna, Austria
Visualizing a Women’s Studies Archive
The Conceptual World of Ines Rieder
Artists and Performers:
Lilo Nein, Marlene Rodrigues, Elisabeth Schimana, Denise Schellmann, Nicole Suzuki
Recital:
Ensemble Airborne Extended
Elena Gabbrielli – Flute
Sonja Leipold – Cembalo
Caroline Mayrhofer – Recorder/Paetzold Contrabass Recorder
Tina Žerdin – Harp
Talk / Text / Discussion:
Margit Hauser, Ulrike Lunacek, Nina Schedlmayer, Petra Unger, Magdalena Vukovic
Women’s walk: with Petra Unger in Wieden
Program of Events
Saturday June 19, 2021
5:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Opening of real and virtual exhibition. The artists will be present.
Where: galerie michaela stock, Schleifmühlgasse 18
Sunday June 20, 2021
11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
11 a.m.: talk by Ulrike Lunacek, followed by conversation and coffee with the artistsand couch chats til 5 p.m.
Where: galerie michaela stock, Schleifmühlgasse 18
Thursday July 08, 2021
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
LANDSCAPE, Recital by Ensemble Airborne Extended
Elena Gabbrielli – Flute, Sonja Leipold – Cembalo, Caroline Mayrhofer – Recorder / Paetzoldina, Tina Žerdin – Harp, Alisa Kobzar – Sound Engineering
Where: galerie michaela stock & Basement, Schleifmühlgasse 18
Monday July 12, 2021
5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Women’s Walk with Petra Unger
Walk in memory of Ines Rieder, tracing the history of the lesbian-feminist movement
Saturday August 28, 2021
5:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Finissage and catalogue presentation
The exhibition will be rounded off with talks, which will examine the conceptual world of Ines Rieder.
Ines Rieder’s Conceptual World
Ines Rieder was a historian, author, feminist and journalist.
Her focus was to reappraise, preserve, and make visible lesbian history.
Ines Rieder was the resident-owner of Schleifmühlgasse 18.
Ines Rieder died unexpectedly in December 2015.
Born in Vienna in 1954, Ines Rieder fought against social injustice and the exploitation of both humans and natural resources, and for the rights of the disadvantaged. And she was a trailblazer who campaigned for research into Austria’s lesbian and gay history. She spent portions of her adult life in Berkeley, San Francisco and Sao Paulo, before returning to live in Vienna.
Among her greatest achievements was her dedication to making lesbian life and its historical background visible, and she emphasized the importance of researching and preserving its history, particularly in open-access archives. Her publications set an example for how to keep that history from being erased and they create opportunities for identification and critical analysis of lesbian personalities. Woman and AIDS, a book she co-authored in 1988, was the first to address that epidemic from a feminist perspective. The primary focus of her later writing and research was on creating biographies of twentieth century lesbians.
After her sudden death, her personal and research papers were transferred to STICHWORT – Archiv der Frauen- und Lesbenbewegung in 2016 for cataloging and conservation. More than 70 archive boxes und 150 database entries comprise this private collection and make possible a comprehensive understanding of her writing and thought process, as well as her often years-long preliminary studies for a project.
Thanks to this archive and the many autobiographical details it has revealed, her conceptual world can now be made visible in a multi-media exhibit. This exhibit is not just the story of an archive of a flesh and blood human, but should show us what happens if an archive, a site that preserves documents and knowledge, is not constantly replenished and thus ceases to exist.
Artist Marlene Rodrigues, Ines Rieder’s life partner for many years, played a major role in creating this exhibit. This is her characterization of Ines’s conceptual world: „Her brain was better than any digital archive. It stored thousands of stories and so much knowledge, so many thoughts and ideas about the life and works of other women. Ines loved life and people, and she enthusiastically absorbed and archived things that change and the stories that go with that.”
Women who knew Ines Rieder or are now involved in her conceptual world, in the archive, have been invited to participate in this exhibit. Here the archive will be re-conceived, expanded and made artistically visible; and in spatial, temporal and social contexts it questions the boundaries of an archive itself, with reference to preservation, access and visibility. The newly created works – whether a poem, musical composition, video, text, performance or drawing – will bring to light the artists personal, internal “conceptual archive”.
Due to the current situation, the exhibit is presented both in a virtual 3D gallery and in the actual exhibition space at Schleifmühlgasse 18 where artworks will be displayed together with some of Ines Rieder`s personal objects representative of her work routine. Talks, concerts and performances will take place in these rooms. Depending on the situation with the epidemic in June 2021, these individual events might also be videotaped without an audience and can be accessed via a virtual stroll between Schleifmühlgasse 18 (the building in which Ines Rieder lived) and the Stichwort Archive at Gusshausstraße 20.
A women’s tour of lesbian-related sites in the neighborhood is planned with Petra Unger.
After the close of the exhibit, all the newly created art works, videos, musical compositions, documents and the virtual exhibit will be transferred to the Stichwort Archive and they will also be accessible in the virtual gallery. In addition, a blog, a multi-page exhibition catalog, posters and video documentation of the talks, concert and performance will accompany the exhibit and can also be called up in the virtual gallery.
