Join this book presentation
Depot – Kunst und Diskussion
Breite Gasse 3
1070 Wien
Rose-Anne Gush's Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT's and Elfriede Jelinek's use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labour. By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond "innocence". Gush demonstrates how their art critiqued postwar Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes postwar artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.
In this book presentation, Gush will be joined by Alexi Kukuljevic, Jenni Tischer and Sophia Rohwetter.
Rose-Anne Gush, Artistic Labour of the Body, (Historical Materialism book series Leiden / Boston: Brill 2026) https://brill.com/display/title/73360 The paperback is forthcoming with Haymarket in November 2026.
Rose-Anne Gush
art theorist/historian, Institute for Contemporary Art, TU Graz
Rose-Anne Gush is an art historian and theorist, and sporadic artist and curator. Her research critically investigates “global art” discourses, feminist Marxist theories, and the politics of artistic labour, focusing on the body, geographies of extraction and liberation, the connections between antifascism and anticolonialism, and the central question of form. She is currently Assistant Professor at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz, Austria. Her recent articles are published in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Camera Austria, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, Third Text and her criticism is published in Berlin Review, Brand-New-Life Magazine and Art Monthly among others. Her first monograph, Artistic Labour of the Body (Brill) was published in 2026.
Alexi Kukuljevic
philosopher/artist, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Alexi Kukuljevic is an artist and a philosopher based in Vienna. He is the author of Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently published by MIT Press. His art work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the ICA in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. He curated the three person exhibition (Krone, Kukuljevic and Sillman) entitled the collapse of the mind’s ordering system leads to some rather wanton developments at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin. His most recent solo exhibition was entitled BIRDWAR, at Åplus in Berlin. He currently holds an appointment as university assistant in the art theory department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He is currently and is currently finishing Like Hell It Is: On Horror and Hilarity.
Jenni Tischer
artist/author/eductor, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Jenni Tischer is an artist, author and educator based in Vienna and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings and installations reformulate form principles, material and spatial references from a feminist perspective. Tischer is particularly interested in the infrastructures of reproductive labor and social reproduction, which through gender, race, and class decisively define the situatedness of the viewer in (social) space and their relationship to themselves and other objects. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna until 2010. Tischer then worked as and editor for the Berlin art magazine Texte zur Kunst. She has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and since 2019 she has been teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Jenni Tischer is co-editor of the edition of “Backyard Economy. Perspectives on Marginalization and Economy.” FKW: Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur (Vienna, 2023) and the anthology Abstraction and Economy. Myths of Growth, De Gruyter (Berlin / Bosten, 2024). Tischer‘s artistic works have been shown in exhibitions at Galerie Krobath Vienna, Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, mumok, Vienna, and Bielefelder Kunstverein, MAK Museum für angewandte Kunst Vienna, MAK Center in Los Angeles, among others.
Sophia Rohwetter
art historian/theorist, University of Vienna
Sophia Roxane Rohwetter is a researcher, writer, and art critic based in Vienna. She studied art history and cultural studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg and Zurich University of the Arts and completed a Master’s in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her thesis on the tragic and the comic in the work of Mike Kelley was recognized by the Academy with the Honorary Award for Scientific Theses. Currently, she is a University Assistant and PhD candidate at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include the history and philosophy of modern and contemporary art, psychoanalysis, and Marxist aesthetics. She often collaborates with artists and curators, contributing writings for exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as mumok, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, Felix Gaudlitz, Meyer Kainer, Lars Friedrich, Weiss Falk,Francis Irv, Kevin Space, and The Wig, among others. In 2024, she was awarded the 1st AICA Prize for Young Art Criticism.