Talks

Stella Rollig

GIVING SPACE TO WOMEN
DONNA HUANCA AT BELVEDERE VIENNA

Friday, 22 March 2019, 6pm
ZHdK, Room 6.K04

https://vimeo.com/326996795

Continuous engagement with the human body, its presence in space as well as its use as material and medium of art, is a central aspect of Donna Huanca’s multidisciplinary work. Based on music and painting, the artist has developed her own aesthetic language over the last ten years, with references to Viennese Actionism, Bolivian vernacular traditions, Yves Klein, and Ana Mendieta. In the Baroque chambers of the Lower Belvedere, Donna Huanca creates an artistic parallel world using sculpture, large-format painting, video works, and soundscapes. Models, whose naked bodies are transformed with colours and textiles, meditatively move about the space in deep concentration.
The talk will discuss the curatorial experience of this project in the context of its challenges for the instiution, mediation and the audience.
Stella Rollig (born 1960 in Vienna, Austria) has been General Director and Scientific Director of the Belvedere since January 2017. She studied German literature and art history at the University of Vienna and worked as an art journalist (e.g. ORF, Der Standard). From 1994 to 1996 Stella Rollig was the Austrian Federal Curator for Fine Arts, during which time she also founded Depot. Kunst und Diskussion in the MuseumsQuartier Vienna. From 2004 to 2016, the exhibition organizer headed the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz. In addition to her curatorial activities, Stella Rollig has taught at numerous institutes, including the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the University of Art and Industrial Design Linz and the ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts. Stella Rollig has been a member of many juries since 2000, including sixpack film, Diagonale, the Msgr. Otto Mauer Prize (2003, 2006, 2012), the Austrian contribution to EXPO 2015 in Milan and the Friedrich Kiesler Prize 2016. As cultural manager, Stella Rollig is a member of the cultural advisory board of ORF III and on the board of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK.