Carola Dertnig

Carola Dertnig lives and works in Vienna. For many years, the artist has been working at the intersection of performance, installation, and feminist art practice. Since 2006, she has headed the Department of Performative Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 1997, she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and has also served as a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles. Dertnig’s works have been and continue to be presented in numerous exhibitions at museums and galleries, including the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich, Krems; Galerie CRONE, Vienna/Berlin; Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna; Solyanka State Gallery, Moscow; REDCAT CalArts Theater, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, New York; Artists Space, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; and Secession, Vienna. In 2024, her work was presented in the solo exhibition Dancing through Life at OK Linz, accompanied by a publication. In 2013, she received the Austrian Art Award.

As early as 1999, Carola Dertnig participated in the renowned PS1 Studio Program. The program provided international artists with studio spaces within the building, enabling them to produce work in dialogue with the New York art scene. Dertnig’s residency at the PS1 studio consolidated her reputation as an important voice in performance art and was also crucial to her international breakthrough. In her slapstick performances of everyday life, the artist staged herself in seemingly banal yet subversively comic situations. One example is a scene in which she desperately attempts to stabilize a wobbly table in a cramped New York kitchen so that she can cut bread on it (Bread, 1997). Dertnig offers a key to a deeper understanding of her performative practice through what she calls her “egg experience.” At the age of 13, she performed as a clown with Circus Roncalli. During her act—in which she jumped out of a giant egg—the artist stumbled and slipped on the sawdust. According to Dertnig, this experience initiated her lifelong artistic research into the interplay of space, body, and performance. In the context of PS1 and the New York art scene, Dertnig’s works can be understood as refreshingly precise feminist deconstructions of everyday behavioural norms and societal roles.

For the KinderKunstLabor, Carola Dertnig developed a body of work combining swings, action painting, and happening for the exhibition FINALLY it’s HAPPENING.