When I draw myself, I exist threefold

In her atelier, the ninety-year-old Florentina Pakosta talks art, money and navigating 1960s Vienna as a woman painter. Echoing Pakosta’s description of her self-portraiture practice, Wenn ich mich zeichne, existiere ich dreifach shows the artist posing and grimacing before a mirror as she answers the filmmaker’s queries, the camera framing her reflection. Part of Christiana Perschon’s series on pioneering women artists living in Vienna, the film crafts a personal interpretation of its subject’s aesthetics to create a formally aware archive of female creativity and an attentive study of a fellow portraitist. (Salvador Amores, Viennale 2023)

"Freedom is not given to you – you have to take it". What Meret Oppenheim once proclaimed could also serve as the unifying principle of the generation of female artists to whom Christiana Perschon has dedicated her film portrait cycle initiated in 2014. And it makes sense that no two portraits are the same: Perschon's cinematic approach to each of her "chosen soulmates" is the result of an empathic collaboration, each time requiring the finding of a new form. In When I draw myself, I exist threefold, Perschon's camera focuses on the painter and drawing artist Florentina Pakosta as...