Artist-in-Residence Elke Auer / Artist Talk
13.5.–13.5.2026.
As part of the Kamov Residency Program and with the support of the Department of Culture of the Styria region, Austrian artist Elke Auer is staying in Rijeka for two months. On Wednesday, May 13 at 6 PM, she will present her artistic practice to the Rijeka audience through a lecture.
In her work, Elke Auer explores feminist, emancipatory, and intersectional theories, and in recent years has focused on reproductive labor, vulnerability and shame, restistant tongues and leaky vessels, biopolitics and hormones, Neolithic representations of gender, as well as tensions between contemporary feminisms and constructions of masculinity. She often works with found materials, language, and borrowed or recycled images and motifs from (art) history.
On Wednesday, May 13, she will present her artistic practice along with first insights of her artistic research project “The Spectre in the Museum or Looking at What Is Not There: Cartography of Absence in the MMSU Rijeka Collection”, which she is developing during the residency.
BIO: Elke Auer was born in 1980 in Graz and grew up in a three-generation household on an apple farm. She studied Visual Media Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since graduating in June 2005, she has been working as a freelance artist in various contexts within the visual arts, as well as a video artist and stage designer in theatre. Together with Eva Jantschitsch and Esther Straganz, she published the zine Cuntstunt, and from 2012 to 2017 she served on the board of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ).
In 2006 she received the Johanna Dohnal Prize for her diploma project Working on Fire (in collaboration with Esther Straganz), and in 2015 she was awarded a state scholarship for visual arts. Residency grants have taken her to London, Rome, São Paulo, New York, and most recently Athens. She has exhibited in Vienna, Graz, Linz, Salzburg, Athens, Berlin, Belgrade, Bilbao, Bangkok, Ljubljana, Krakow, São Paulo, and London, and has curated several group exhibitions at the VBKÖ. She lives with her child (born 2022) and her partner in Vienna.
Photo: Philipp Haupt
