texts — Ana Hoffner

Ana Hoffner ex- Prvulovic* films, installations, performances and texts offer an aesthetic and political redefinition of gendered relations – especially in the realms of memory and identity politics at work in recent history and in the frame of contemporary visual production. Specifically, she focuses in her performative investigations on moments of queerness and non-alignment in both colonial and fascist regimes of power.

The publication documents for the first time the work of the artist to date, in particular her* most important previous projects are translated into book format: Freud Film, Non-aligned relatives, The Bacha Posh Project, Private View and Active Intolerance.

In Freud Film, Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* deals with the unconscious within the development of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory and tackles the racialized and heteropatriarchal dimension of its concept of “alterity”, which is foundational to the constitution of a modern “European identity” – based, actually, on the exclusion of others. Non-alignment as a geopolitical reality and as a concept – a political and cultural refusal to align to certain normative models and behaviors – recurs often in the artist’s work. Non-aligned Relatives is a work constellation in which she* investigates diverse aspects of non-alignment, on political, cultural, and psychoanalytical levels, especially also linking it to formations of queer kinship, a strategy which continues in The Bacha Posh Project.

The series Private View tackles investment in art institutions from the weapons industry, hedgefund companies, and investors of Nazi heritage, thus, in a self-reflexive movement, questioning the capacity of the art field itself to welcome, support, and stand for minoritarian alternatives and non-aligned thought. In Active Intolerance, Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*’s research tackles diverse forms of exploitation of labor in enclosed environments, namely the factory and the prison. The artist once again investigates the liberal and capitalist political project and its relentless construction of, on the one hand, working, consuming, complying, and reproducing bodies and, on the other, of those, who are to be exploited.

Publisher: Sternberg Press/Kunsthalle Wien
Texts by Anne Faucheret, Flavia Matei, Sónia Melo, Sara Reisman, Marlène Rigler
Design by Till Gathmann
24×30 cm,
120 pages
88 color and 121 b/w ill., softcover
2023

ISBN: ISBN 978-1-915609-11-3

The Queerness of Memory proposes ways of remembering a past that cannot be clearly seen, one which is loaded with affective confusion, historical disorientation and the desire to return to that which still hurts. Ana Hoffner's series of art works and writings that are assembled in this book explore the politics of trauma and post '89 memory through the lens of queerness.

How to give a post-memorial account based on non-biological transnational kinship relations? How to interrogate images of war from a distance? The author challenges the notions that fantasy and memory are exclusively imagined or remembered scenarios: facing the trauma of others, when it is not directly experienced but transferred through documents, reports or narratives, requires further processes of dis/identification and performative practices like retelling, rereading, restaging, looking or imagining. By experimenting with techniques that stem from the reservoir of unconscious visual impressions, the book opens up questions about the embodied structure of memory, refusing the supposed dichotomy of war and peace time.

Publisher: b_books
152 pages
14cm × 24cm
Format: Paperback
2018

ISBN: 9783942214261