Sarah Decristoforo
Freelance artist
Text, installation, light & sound
Linz / Upper Austria
[…] an exhaust that spews cigarette smoke, a car that runs on pure vodka. She's revving the engine, she's popping the clutch, she's rolling straight down the hill, […]
// Text: Nina Tabassomi
Director & Curator TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol / Innsbruck
Jury statement_PAUL FLORA PRIZE 2020
At a young age, Sarah Decristoforo has already produced a multifaceted body of work that deals artistically with the most relevant issues of our time. In her complex installations, she combines different media such as video, sound, text, graphics, performance and light, which together open up spaces of questioning. In particular, Decristoforo's works show the intersections of different discourses and practices around the female in our society - their theoretical roots and their current drives. However, the artist seems to fertilize this with an alternative humus that gives an idea of the possibilities for change. In her most recent work, she self-reflectively links the problem context with the demands placed on young artists. Not knowing, but searching, she shares dead ends and potential openings with the public of her works.
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// Text: Dagmar Schink
Management of the VALIE EXPORT Center
Text on the exhibition The Marvelous Miss D
This time the show world becomes the artist's stage. This raises questions about the entertainment value of art and the fact that artists have to constantly reinvent themselves in order to remain exciting for the public. The critical question of the role assigned to women in the entertainment industry is clearly addressed, although the attraction of the show format itself is enchanting. The start of this show in six acts is theopening act. Curtain up. The neon sign flashes and captivates passers-by. If one can recognize the text, the onomatopoeic word rewards us, like a fanfare.TADAAA. In the booth, the F.Machine relieves itself and right next door you can listen to a magical and tragic love story about a lady who has been split down the middle of her body and who tends to lose her abdomen. Same with two abdomens isStripsy Kingkongan artistic reaction that refers to a phenomenon on the net. iStripper or Desktop Stripper can be downloaded onto the computer to be entertained at any time. The final act is then a pulsating red.Marsoversits in the ox eyeof the building. A porthole at the interface between public space and exhibition space. The light emanates from the edge, increases and then levels off again, like a signal that communicates to the outside world. The show is accompanied and contextualized with a leaflet that guides you through the program. We wish you good entertainment!
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// Text: Jürgen Tabor
Curator and art historian, Innsbruck
The focus of Sarah Decristoforo's work is the examination of films, images, texts and symbolic languages in which political and social power practices manifest themselves. Her works, which interweave different media levels from video and photography to sound, text and installations, are based on analyzes and recontextualisations of cultural forms of expression that transport repressive mechanisms and phantasms - even in such intimate but all the more sensitive areas such as sexuality . The video"My Adult Comedy Drama"and the accompanying script book reveal certain mechanisms of pornographic language, in which Decristoforo combines text fragments from different sources into a new, quasi timeless collage. Inscriptions from Pompeian brothel walls, literary passages from Pietro Aretino to Marquis de Sade to Charles Bukowski, but also anonymous texts from current cybersex conversations form a network of pornographic speech acts that are as impressive and rich in images as they are simplified and raw. The text is processed into a conversation in the video, which is conducted by two actresses and two actors with blunt directness and almost without emotion. They embody four characters (cheerleader, craftsman, artist, pizza man) who react to each other, but only place their own ego at the center of their desire and explain the other as an instrument of satisfaction or submission as the supposed desire of the other claim. The script book gathers detailed information and notes about the sources, authors and historical contexts from which the text passages used originate. Sarah Descristoforo carried out an essential part of the research work for "My Adult Comedy Drama" during a research stay at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington/Indiana.
(from the catalogue: Collection Land Tirol / 2019)
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// Text: Nina Tabassomi
Director & Curator TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol / Innsbruck
In Sarah Decristoforo's work, three influential male conceptions of threatening female sexuality merge into a figuration of ambivalent desire that glows with high tension:PAN DOOR AAAAH. Pandora (from Greek mythology: the first woman and at the same time the bringer of all earthly evils), Sigmund Freud's "Fall Dora" (the idea of hysteria as a result of perverse female tendencies), and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" (the child-woman who male instincts inevitably provoked) merge in a text breathed by a female voice with an erotic timbre. The speaker booths opposite the glowing red neon signPAN DOOR AAAAHforce the heads of the visitors into this narrow grid of traditional ideas and the bodies against steep peaks. The three female figures show numerous cross-connections, as the annotated text in the leporello shows. Does the thwarting, overlapping, ad absurdum quoting in words, high tension and sound allow us to strip these discriminating inscriptions from our sexed bodies, or at least to re-tattoo them? (Text for the exhibition SEX / 2018)
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// Text: Jürgen Tabor
Curator and art historian, Innsbruck
A basic principle of Sarah Decristoforo's multimedia and text works is the examination of films, images, texts, symbolic languages and aesthetics from everyday culture and mass media, which speak about political and social power relations and thereby penetrate into intimate, sometimes obscene areas. In her research-based work, she analyzes and recontextualizes cultural expressions that are as direct and unmediated as graffiti and pornographic images, but also as reflective as academic works. The light and sound installation "My Intimate Mash Up"is borrowed from a found wall graffiti in which the sacred of love and the devilish of desire form an ambivalent synthesis. With the treatment of the title melodies of the films "The Exorcist" and "The Devil in Miss Jones" she refers to an obsession in which the religious and the sexual mix. The video installation"My Adult Comedy Drama"and the accompanying script book of the same name deal with pornographic language and speech acts. While the script represents a personal as well as scientific text collage, the video work weaves soberly spoken but extremely explicit instructions and descriptions from different sources and contexts into a dense, rhythmic dialogue that, like the pornographic itself, fascinates and irritates at the same time.(from: RLB Art Prize, exhibition catalog / 2018)
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// Text: Martina Gelsinger
Art Department / Diocesan Conservatory of the Diocese of Linz
The new memorial is located in front of the existing war memorial as an extension, which remains unchanged in its historical substance and time-related nature. As a reference, the “extension” opens up an independent dialogue space that invites reflection. The scientifically researched names and biographical data can be read on a commemorative plaque made of glass at the entrance to the base. A band of metal writing is incorporated flush into the paved floor directly at the stairway. The text of the scroll reads:alert understand dust breath hole open silently repress forget moment shadow traces hear consciously keep silent keep thoughts recognize obscure resist remember truth". These are selected words from the novel "Lena, our village and the war" by the children's and youth book author Käthe Recheis (1928 - 2015). The writer, who lives in Upper Austria, has critically dealt with the subject of war and the Nazi era in Upper Austria in numerous works. The terms before the ascent open up a new perspective - from a spatial and, in a figurative sense, temporal distance. The words encourage you to reflect on what is happening, including individual terms. The viewers thus become part of the entire memorial site. With their intervention, the artists do not change the monument, but only its time-related view of it and in this way encourage people to “talk about it”. (To work7 people - 7 victims. Accompanying text to the opening of the monument / 2018)
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// Text: Genoveva Rueckert
Curator OK Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz /Austria
Caught between pattern and motif
A street brawl, a civil war fighter from Sudan, the Bloods and Crips Gang, Guantanamo Bay prisoners, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a soldier with a tank barrier adorn the large installation in the form of a curtain. Embedded in a stylized landscape, the ten templates from the internet appear as repetitive motifs. The copper engraving-like drawing, the reddish hue and the fine foliage refer to the French Toile de Jouy fabrics of the Rococo period. Only at second glance does the continuously repeated pattern reveal current media images that are associated with violence, instead of the supposedly idyllic depictions of shepherds á la Boucher or Fragonard. Camouflaged in a figurative pattern, they appear irritating and the game between a (domestic) interior space sealed off by the curtain and the outside, with its public world of images, opens up lightly. The strategy of camouflage, the shift in context, the dialectic of outside and inside, dealing with everyday violence and working with existing materials and patterns characterize Sarah Decristoforo's work. (To workcache cache, from: Under A Tinsel Sun, III Moscow International Biennale For Young Art / 2012)