Standpoint Autotheory: Writing Embodied Experiences and Relational Artistic Practice

Twelve artists explore radically self-reflexive research attitudes integrating embodied experiences within the production of theory.

Standpoint Autotheory brings together essays from artists whose research-based work has been produced in the context of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (within it, after it, or despite it). With texts by Ana de Almeida, Andrea Ancira, Cana Bilir-Meier, Lena Ditte Nissen, Nina Höchtl, Olena Khoroshylova, Sanja Lasic, Mai Ling, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Stephanie Misa, Mariel Rodríguez, Elif Süsler-Rohringer, and Ruth Sonderegger, the publication reflects on how the academy has directly and indirectly contributed to shaping a research attitude in the Austrian artistic scene and abroad.

The contributions explore the entanglements of subjectivity and criticality through various modes of thinking and artistic practice, including autoethnography, practices of the self, auto-historia teoría, standpoint theories, strong objectivity and situated knowledge, self-authority, narrativity and storytelling, radical positioning, performative philosophy, autofiction, and thinking-feeling. Through integrating embodied experiences with the production of theory, the practices featured in Standpoint Autotheory illuminate connections between the personal and political, and the individual and communal, ultimately aiming towards social transformation through questioning dominant epistemologies.

Copublished by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Ana de Almeida is an artist and researcher living and working in Lisbon and Vienna. In her practice, de Almeida deals with individual and collective memory and processes of remembering from a socio-political perspective, with the intersection of family-narratives and macro-political events and with processes of privatization of history. She is a Doc-Team fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and research assistant at the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna.

Mariel Rodríguez Rodríguez is a research based artist interested in decolonial artistic methodologies, resistance practices, self reflexivity and relational research forms. Her artistic practice and theoretical reflections are shaped by her personal experience of migration from Mexico to Austria and the movements within. In her work she explores connections between identity construction and representation from an intersectional perspective moving between different media and aesthetic languages. She works as lecturer and assistant at the Institute of Fine Arts and Cultural Studies in the area of Artistic Research at the University of Arts and Design in Linz.