Ale Bachlechner

I’m Sure Everybody’s Doing Their Best

Friendly Discomfort

The performance and video artist Ale Bachlechner (b. Brixlegg, Austria, 1984; lives and works in Cologne and Vienna) examines the overwhelming challenges that lurk in everyday personal interactions and the pitfalls of neoliberalism. Combining critical acumen with sly humor, her works entangle herself and her audience in tricky questions of public image cultivation and social inequality. Taking her cue from popular media formats, competitive situations, and selfcare offerings, Bachlechner realizes performance installations and videos in which she often also stars. Her fictional characters range from contact broker to personal coach, from workshop leader to a naked ape receiving networking advice amid the wasteland of Death Valley. For another performance, the artist recruits male members of the audience to reenact psychoanalytical sessions that eventually go off the rails.

The monograph surveys Bachlechner’s performances and videos of the past ten years and provides extensive insight into her multidisciplinary practice. With essays by Kerstin Honeit and Ellen Maria Wagner as well as a conversation between Phil Collins, Sharon Smith, and Lilian Haberer and a dialogue between the artist and the writer Anke Stelling.