Freies Kino: Lisl Ponger – To Whom It May Concern

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A Taiwanese dance festival, a Nigerian harvest celebration, a Turkish wedding, the national holiday of the Ivory Coast, a Thai New Year, a Roma gathering, a Czech drinking bout: Almost every country, culture, and ethnicity is represented in a Central European metropolis like Vienna, each with its own forms and conventions of gathering and preserving identity. People meet in congress halls and back rooms, in restaurants and places of worship. Between 1991 and 1992, Lisl Ponger systematically explored the "foreign Vienna." She kept a diary of her encounters. Eleven years later, she edited her material into a film. "Phantom Fremdes Wien" deconstructs familiar "ethnographic tables": It does not focus on characteristic gestures, typical costumes, or distinctive music, but rather on the diverse forms of transition and montage. Representation becomes an open process, and the foreign Vienna remains—despite all its proximity—a phantom (Bert Rebhandl, abridged).

Lisl Ponger works on stereotypes, racism, and visual constructions at the intersection of art, art history, and ethnology through the media of photography, film, installation, and text. From 1974 to 1978, she stayed in the USA and Mexico. She has been making films since 1979. In 1988, she received the Austrian Promotion Prize for Film Art, and in 1994, the Recognition Award for Film Art. She is a founding member of sixpackfilm and a member of the Wiener Secession. She has had numerous exhibitions both domestically and internationally. She lives and works in Vienna.

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