/Secession Podcast Members: Constanze Ruhm in conversation with Christa Blümlinger
The conversation with media and film artist Constanze Ruhm focuses in particular on works from the last 20 years, starting with curatorial activities such as the exhibition Fate of Alien Modes (2003) commissioned by the Secession, which highlighted the discursive connections between film and art. After studying visual media design with Peter Weibel, her artistic projects evolved from conceptual art and an interest in digital technologies and media dispositives to the reconstruction of cinematic spaces and a critique of male-coded visual regimes and scenarios. Constanze Ruhm explains the gestures of appropriation she developed in the course of her work with female figures in film history. In the course of her research, which takes her from film archives to historical sites, she reinterprets ancient myths from a feminist perspective and links them to the roles of real figures and contemporary contexts. In this context, the conversation focuses on Ruhm's work on Italian feminism, which stems from her engagement with Carla Lonzi. This is evident, among other things, in her interest in gestures of interruption and resistance as possibilities for political action, but also as strategies for self-empowerment and for making female labour and solidarity visible. The figure of the rehearsal plays a special role in Ruhm's cinematic essays on forms of reenactment and casting. It leads to an essential question: how can the historical feminism of the 1970s be viewed from the present, and what can it say to younger generations today?
This episode was recorded on 7 July 2025 at the Secession.
Constanze Ruhm is an artist, filmmaker, author and curator. In her installations, films, photographic series and publications, she explores the relationships between different time-based forms in film, visual art and new media. She investigates their respective histories and theories, often focusing on rehearsal processes and strategies of re-enactment. Her thematic focus is on questions of the cinematic gaze and cinematic narration and the associated power relations, on feminist dramaturgy and theories of film, and on the role of archives within contemporary cinematic artistic practice. Her works, which lie somewhere between essay, fiction and documentary, focus in particular on female film characters in order to retell their narratives from a contemporary, feminist perspective. The works are shown both on the cinema screen and in installation exhibition formats.
She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Efebo d'Oro Città di Palermo for New Languages, the Outstanding Artist Award for Documentary Film (2021), the Prize for Innovative Cinema at the diagonale (2020), the Lower Austria Media Art Award (2009), the City of Vienna Fine Arts Award (2009), the Women's Art Award for Media Art (2000), and many more. Since 1996, Constanze Ruhm has been teaching internationally: as a professor of video at the Offenbach University of Art and Design and, from 2003 to 2006, at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart; from 2006 to 2011 as part of a residency programme at the Art Institute Boston at Lesley University. Since 2006, she has been professor of art and media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. International exhibition activity; numerous curatorial projects (e.g. Fate of Alien Modes, Secession Vienna 2003; Putting Rehearsal to the Test in collaboration with Sabeth Buchmann and Ilse Lafer (VOX - Centre de l’image contemporain / Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery / SBC Gallery, Montréal 2016); curatorial programmes as part of various festivals and exhibitions. Her works are regularly shown at international festivals (Berlinale, FID Marseille, Era New Horizons, Jeonju International Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Essay Film Festival London, Diagonale, Viennale…). In 2017, she founded the queer-feminist concept choir MALA SIRENA together with Florian Paul Ebner, which she directed until 2023.
Christa Blümlinger is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She has published numerous works on essay and documentary film, avant-garde, media art and film aesthetics, as well as on Austrian film; her contributions have appeared in journals such as Trafic, Radical Philosophy and Cargo. Her publications in German include Kino aus zweiter Hand. Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst (2009), in English, among others, Morgan Fisher, Off-Screen Cinema, edited with Jean-Philippe Antoine (2017). Recent book publications: Harun Farocki. Du cinéma au musée (P.O.L. 2022) and Horizontes documentales. Escritos selectos sobre cine (La Fuga / Ediciones Metales, 2025).
Secession Podcast: Members is a series of conversations featuring members of the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Jeanette Pacher & Bettina Spörr
Photo: © Vitória Monteiro
