H13 Niederoesterreich Preis für Performance 2016: Andrea Maurer - SELBSTZERLEGUNG

About

The winner of the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance is unanimous: Andrea Maurer’s performance “Selbstzerlegung” [Self-Deconstruction] thoroughly convinced the H13 jury with its “consistent experimental approach to language, generated from an interplay between construction and deconstruction, from a mistrust in words, and from her passion to investigate things down to the tiniest detail.”

In her work Maurer reacts to our current social and political situation, which in the artist’s view is ridden with crisis. Her response subjects space, objects, and language to a – at times also comical – distortion.

SELBSTZERLEGUNG [Self-Deconstruction] is an extensive monologue that takes place amidst and with reference to deconstruction work on oversized spatial structures. Andrea Maurer employs letters, words, and sentences in the same manner as the wooden constructions, table legs, saws, and hammer: Nothing is left in its place. Reading and sawing here, stuttering and murmuring, drilling and hammering there.

Maurer exposes herself to these faltering constructions, literally throwing herself into a monologue that time and again goes back to beginning, never comes to a definite ending, and seems to deconstructs itself over the course of the performance.

.