Christiana Perschon. Spending Time, Holding Space

Opening reception
Saturday, September 27, 5PM–7PM
Artist in attendance
Free admission / Wine and catering generously offered by the Embassy of Austria Ottawa

After-party
7PM–2AM
Presented as part of Debaser's Pique fall edition and the Ottawa International Animation Festival
Admission: Pay What You Can [Buy your ticket here.]

Spending Time, Holding Space is the first solo exhibition in North America by Vienna-based visual artist and filmmaker Christiana Perschon. Featuring new film and video installations, the exhibition was developed through a two-part residency supported by the Erste Bank Art Award in Austria and produced in collaboration with SAW and DAS WEISSE HAUS in Vienna.

Perschon’s practice brings together documentary and performative strategies to create filmic portraits that resist dominant norms of representation and regimes of the gaze. Formally experimental, her portraits of women artists open a dialogical space between filmmaker, camera and subject, where presence and representation are continually renegotiated.

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Christiana Perschon (Vienna, Austria) is a filmmaker and visual artist. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Art and Film. She has worked for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), the Austrian Audiovisual Archive (Österreichische Mediathek), the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society and the Austrian Film Museum as the curator of the exhibition In Person: Barbara Hammer. She often creates films collaboratively with the protagonists, where interaction defines the imagery and the camera acts as the receiver of the gaze in an intergenerational dialogue. She has received numerous prizes, including the Österreichischen Kunstpreis für Filmkunst (2022), the Best Camera Award at the Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film (2019), the Theodor Körner Preis (2018) and the Best Austrian Short Film at Vienna Shorts (2014). Her films have been shown at international film festivals, including the Viennale, New Horizons International Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Duisburger Filmwoche, Visions du Réel and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She is a member of the Vienna-based video and film artists’ platform Golden Pixel Cooperative.

www.christiana.perschon.at

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Exhibition and residency presented by SAW and DAS WEISSE HAUS (Vienna), with the support of Erste Bank, the Embassy of Austria Ottawa and the Austrian Cultural Forum Ottawa

Erste Bank Art Award Jury: Lisa Butzenlechner (Ottawa), Ruth Goubran (Vienna), Nevena Jankovic (Vienna), Hana Ostan Ozbolt (Vienna) and Jason St-Laurent (Ottawa)

Exhibition design: Jason St-Laurent (Ottawa)

Commissioned text: Anne Faucheret (Vienna)