Carola Dertnig

Dancing Through Life
OK Linz

“One is not given space, one occupies it.”

Carola Dertnig’s (b. Innsbruck, 1963; lives and works in Vienna) oeuvre encompasses drawings, collages, and photographs as well as live performances in public settings. Her performative art is informed by her probing studies of movement as a language and the history and theory of performance. In pieces like Tanzporträt Harald Kreutzberg (2014) or Lora Sana (2005), a feminist history of Viennese Actionism, she devises novel forms of historiography that stake out a new place in the present for performers who may have been forgotten. Based on numerous interviews with women who were part of Viennese Actionism in the 1960s and 1970s, she develops the fictional Actionist Lora Sana to champion a revision of this largely male-dominated terrain in a female perspective.

The publication Dancing Through Life presents a comprehensive survey of Carola Dertnig’s oeuvre from 1997 to 2024. The book documents the solo exhibition of one of Austria’s leading performance artists at OK Linz by retracing her artistic research into the history and theory of performance art. With an essay by Freda Fiala, an introduction by Michaela Seiser, and a conversation between Barbara Clausen and the artist.