Parallel Vienna

Skulpturenpark

July - 26. August

Toscanapark Gmunden

Kleine Galerie

Ambivalenz der Wirklichkeit, Magie des Objekts, Poesie der Erzählung

June 01 - July 07, 2022

Objects and Installations by:

Hubert Christian Ehalt – Palimpsest,
Gotthard Fellerer – Gaia,
Julia Fromm – Fleisch,
Ulrich Gansert – Mensch und Tier
Martina Pippal / Götz Bury – Liebe
Elisabeth von Samsonow – Göttinnen

Taxis Palais Kunsthalle Tirol

GODDESSES

February 04 - May 29, 2022

Ursula Beiler, Karrabing Film Collective, Emeka Ogboh, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Tejal Shah

How can we follow other paths that are as good for us as we are for them?
How can we act without categorizing, measuring, and evaluating?
How can we enjoy energetic fields in their plurality instead of conceiving of them as an omniscient center that watches over us and punishes?
What if we were to work with resonances instead of categorical pruning?
What frequencies do we send out and what frequencies do we receive?
What if we were to become permeable to the logics of goddesses, who have no fixed shape but nevertheless act as diverse forces promoting individual idiosyncrasies, integrating these within a greater whole?
What if we were to recognize the unique as always an integral part of the general and only resulting from it?
What if we were to draw joy from the movement of others and the Other?
What if we understood that we belong to the Other as much as the Other belongs to us?
What if the neighbor was all and everything that surrounds us? Is this what we wish to call goddesses?
And why is there an urgent need for such an attitude?

In order to explore these questions, the exhibition GODDESSES acts in an unusual way. The logic of wholeness, part, beginning and ending will be unsettled. However, these strategies should not be confused with the goddesses, they are only a game in a situation where we should play to interrupt what we have learned. A small first step, just to challenge our cozy false equilibrium for a while. We have to start somewhere—why not here, with us, now? The exhibition will grow before your eyes, the works will stand for themselves without explanation. You can encounter them without fear and without brutality—you can simply be with them, with the goddesses at your back. You are invited, several times.

The exhibition will unfold processually over time. Starting with paintings and sculptures by Elisabeth von Samsonow, works by the Karrabing Film Collective, Tejal Shah, and Emeka Ogboh will move one by one into the TAXISPALAIS; in between Ursula Beiler will present performances. The public is admitted to the show four times with a single ticket, and will have the opportunity to witness the works being set up. Newsletters will be sent out once each new work has been installed. On the Walpurgis Night we will celebrate, pandemic protocols allowing.

Curated by Nina Tabassomi

State Gallery of Lower Austria

Reading the Earth

THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES‘ PROJECT
12.03.2022 - 01.05.2022

Galerie Jünger

Foto Wien - Gegend Versus Idyll

12.März bis 24. April 2022

Elisabeth von Samsonow

The Elder Poem

Grazer Kunstverein
25. Juni – 12. September 2021

What if the alphabet was invented by the trees? What if the alphabet was invented by the trees? In her project The Elder Poem Elisabeth von Samsonow explores and stages convergencies  between art and ecology, namely poetry and botanical systems. Starting from the Old Irish Alphabet of Trees Beth-Luis-Nion as explored by Robert von Ranke-Graves in his voluminous book ”The White Goddess“ Samsonow maps the Land of the Goddesses, which she co-founded with agroup of artists and supporters (among them the Grazer Kunstverein) in 2020 in Lower Austria.This land is a highly diverse territory with wine, wood, field and bushland. Using a system of association between letter, tree, place, quality, historical and mythical narratives (which is also the case in the Alphabet of Trees), von Samsonow reads the landscape of this biodiverse habitat, and in doing so creates a journey into the core of imagination, a poem written by the land itself.

Von Samsonow‘s project aims at giving space to gestures of attention and mutual recognition,expanding the zone of transhuman communication. The project seeks to offer new dimensions to ”thinking Gaias“ or ”reading Gaia“, the autopoetic planetary force, and to support the creation of ”trigger points“ which serve as nodes for building a complex architecture of coexistence.

The Elder, giving name to the project, is a bush or tree that features frequently in fairy tales, folkmedicine and mythology, as a healing plant offering flower, berry and bark for therapeutical use. Technically it is a pioneering plant able to grow even under difficult conditions. The Goddesses‘Land is located in the region of Hollabrunn referring to the connection between the Elder and the ”fountain of Holla“ which is the Goddess, more precisely: the White Goddess or her Winter aspect.The project engages with local village residents, hunters and farmers in order to retrace the manifold imaginaire of Elder in the region.

Ringel, Ringel, Reihe,

sind der Kinder dreie,

wir sitzen unterm Hollerbusch

https://www.parnass.at/news/elisabeth-von-samsonow-the-elder-poem

Smolka Contemporary

Studierende der Akademie der bildenden Künste

ECO FLIRT

21.06. – 17.07.2021 / Soon
curated by Elisabeth von Samsonow and Kate Strain

Land of the Goddess (Photo David Sanderson)

Elisabeth von Samsonow

Die Erfindung der Vogelstimmen

Forum Schloss Wolkersdorf
Sa, 19 Juni 14:00 - So, 18 Juli 18:00

Vienna Biennale
For Change 2021

PLANET LOVE.
Climate Care in the digital Age
28.5.-3.10.2021

The Dissident Goddesses’ Land

In summer 2020, a group of artists and culture workers founded the four-hectare “Land of the Goddesses” in the Pulkau Valley (Lower Austria). This is biodiverse land covered with vineyards, forests, overgrown scrubland, wasteland, and fallow. The land will be used for THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK—a research project at the Academy of Fine Arts—as a laboratory for an investigation in the sense of contemporary Eco Art and deep ecology practice. A Mongolian yurt on a Palaeolithic site near Alberndorf serves as an in-situ parliament for encounters, projects, storytelling, and community teaching. The aim is to facilitate measures against climate change: targeted planting, water detection, improvement of humus.

GPL Contemporary

Pain-t-ianer*innen

Group exhibition
curated by Christian Stock

8.5.-31.5.2021

Frauenmuseum Bonn

Langeweile im Paradies

Group exhibition
07.3.- 31.10.2021 

Eva teilt den Apfel nicht

"Fata Morgana" - Biggi Slongo

Film premiere

Image: A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift, production still from HD video, Elisabeth Von Samsonow, 2021

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture with support from the French Embassy in Ireland present:

A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift

Film premiere
16 April 2021, 9pm

A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is a new film commission curated by Kate Strain. Evolving through many iterations, A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is a collaborative film by Austrian artist and philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow and commissioned artists Ruby Wallis and Michaele Cutaya, Michelle Doyle, Ruth Le Gear, Marielle MacLeman, Naïmé Perrette, Liliane Puthod, Sara Sadik.

The film gathers contributions from each artist, through film, sculpture, music, sound and design, and uses collaged footage to investigate our access to nature through poetry. The codes that we as humans attempt to decipher - trees / alphabet / place, the inherent wisdom of the open air, and how to share it between practices and disparate geographic locations is a central theme of the film. Elisabeth von Samsonow is interested in the role of the White Goddess, and the Deep Ecology movement. Seeking to create poetry from the forest, she created an alphabet based on trees native to both Ireland and Austria.

"How to do an art project with people involved in different countries during a pandemic? The lockdown can also be taken as another word for territorialisation as everybody had to stay right in their place. Territorialisation, unintentional or intentional, means coming-backto-one’s world, to reattach oneself to a segment of the world. Instead of all meeting together in the region of Galway, we started to rethink Ireland, where we did not go, in Lower Austria. We had wanted to give shape to our project through the old Irish alphabet of trees, Beth-Luis-Nion [also known as Ogham], which was widely commented on by Robert von Ranke-Graves in his voluminous book The White Goddess (1948). To this end we remapped the Land of the Goddesses, a highly diverse territory with vineyards, wood, field and bushland in Lower Austria. Filming in this context became a process of self-reflexion and awareness in relation to the perception of the land. Via the performances, the documentation of the land was freed from the historical stereotypes of ‘landscape’. The performative gaze on the land is more of a guerrilla type of solidarisation and reterritorialisation that can also be seen in the footage that was produced by the collaborating artists. A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift turned out to be a model of how to do journeys without moving.” Elisabeth von Samsonow

A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is an example of total field operation - exploring the relationships between diverse spaces and places at a time when physical contact and travel has become impossible. Curated by Kate Strain, edited by Eavan Aiken and produced by Anne Mullee, the film will premiere online on Friday 16th April at 9pm.

https://www.tulca.ie/a-visit-a-ceremony-a-gift

Register for tickets here

Commissioned by TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture.

Elisabeth von Samsonow 

La Femme Habitable
How to squat on a woman

(12‘, A 2020)

Produced by THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES‘ NETWORK (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) in cooperation with THE LAND OF THE GODDESSES (Alberndorf and Haugsdorf, Lower Austria) for the Collateral Project INFINITE VILLAGES/ MANIFESTA 13

curated by Francisca Viudes

The performance video LA FEMME HABITABLE unfolds the registers of dwelling, on a site within the LAND OF THE GODDESSES (Alberndorf im Pulkautal, Lower Austria) which was purchased and founded by a group of artists and cultural workers in 2020.

Founding the LAND OF THE GODDESSES was motivated by the large number of prehistoric Venuses which were discovered in Lower Austria, among them the reknowned Venus of Willendorf. A Mongolian yurt designed as the in-situ-parliament of THE LAND OF THE GODDESSSES provides the stage set for a series of gestures by which the performer and co-performers scan ecologically relevant intertwinements of bodies: the large body of Gaia, mother earth, the landscape, the surrounding horizons, the woods, the humans and other beings, plants and fruits.

The mongolian tent, built upon a paleolithic mammouth hunterer site from the time of he Venus of Willendorf, acts like a hot spot or trigger point in this setting, like a portal for entering the fairy tale dimensions of the land. The agencement of mother earth, the milieu and the bodies of the performers unveil to which extent the „body producing body“, namely the female body, serves as an origin to all forms of habitat..

script and set design: Elisabeth von Samsonow
performer: Elisabeth von Samsonow, Evelyn Plaschg and Florian Holzer, Karl Koran, Elisabeth Koran, Gerda Schaludek, Luna
camera: Mira Kluge
postproduction: Elisabeth von Samsonow and Mira Kluge
sound and vocals: David Sanderson Austria

Austria, 2020, 13‘10

Photo Credit: Elisabeth von Samsonow 

Elisabeth von Samsonow 

Loess. A Woman in the Landscape

Elisabeth von Samsonow works focus on the material loess in which the Venus figurines had been well packed until the were excavated. Her approach is characterized by a highly attentive form of encounter and sensitive mapping of the loess landscape of Lower Austria. It is this attitude that Deborah Bird Rose defines as ecological humanity. 

A Woman in the Landscape

Curator: Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

Photo credit: Leo Pluschkowitz 

In cooperation with THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES‘ NETWORK 

and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Landesgalerie Niederösterreich Krems

The Parents' Bedroom Show

Video-Installation