To follow up on the ongoing presentation of Films by Peter Tscherkassy, MUBI and INDEX are teaming up once again to open up another showcase of experimental cinema, this one focusing on Lisl Ponger (site). "A visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker, Ponger is equally at home at Documenta (she participated in 2002) and at film festivals," wrote Brigitte Huck for Artforum in 2007. "Acting (often in the same work) as director, set designer, performer, and archivist, she investigates the interfaces between art and science, between sociology, art history, and political activism, moving obliquely through these disciplines to create compositions of explosive power and precise observation."
In Passages (1996), Ponger "creates an imaginary map of the 20th century on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn tracks of occidental memory," writes Christa Blümlinger. More from Bert Rebhandl in frieze. In Déjà Vu (1999), Ponger examines the notion of the "expelled and transformed 'foreigner.'" Phantom Foreign Vienna (2004; image above) is presented as a series of diary entries in which she reveals "her encounter with the 'multi-culti' Vienna of the early 90s as profoundly subjective," argues Christian Höller.
As a photographer, Lisl Ponger began documenting happenings staged by such Vienna Actionists as Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Peter Weibel. When she turned to film, awards followed: the Austrian Promotion Award for Film Art in 1988 and the Honorary Award for Film Art in 1994. Ponger is a founding member of the vital distributor sixpackfilm and a member of the Vienna Secession.