First monograph.
Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic's films, installations, performances, and texts offer an aesthetic and political redefinition of gendered relations—especially in the realms of memory and identity politics at work in recent history and in the frame of contemporary visual production. Specifically, she focuses in her performative investigations on moments of queerness and non-alignment in both colonial and fascist regimes of power.
The publication documents for the first time the work of the artist to date, in particular her most important previous projects are translated into book format: Freud Film, Non-aligned relatives, The Bacha Posh Project, Private View and Active Intolerance.
In Freud Film, Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic deals with the unconscious within the development of Freud's psychoanalytical theory and tackles the racialized and heteropatriarchal dimension of its concept of "alterity", which is foundational to the constitution of a modern "European identity"—based, actually, on the exclusion of others. Non-alignment as a geopolitical reality and as a concept—a political and cultural refusal to align to certain normative models and behaviors—recurs often in the artist's work. Non-aligned Relatives is a work constellation in which she investigates diverse aspects of non-alignment, on political, cultural, and psychoanalytical levels, especially also linking it to formations of queer kinship, a strategy which continues in The Bacha Posh Project.
The series Private View tackles investment in art institutions from the weapons industry, hedgefund companies, and investors of Nazi heritage, thus, in a self-reflexive movement, questioning the capacity of the art field itself to welcome, support, and stand for minoritarian alternatives and non-aligned thought. In Active Intolerance, Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic's research tackles diverse forms of exploitation of labor in enclosed environments, namely the factory and the prison. The artist once again investigates the liberal and capitalist political project and its relentless construction of, on the one hand, working, consuming, complying, and reproducing bodies and, on the other, of those, who are to be exploited.
Published following Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic's exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien in 2022.
Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic (on the crossroads of who was born 1980 in Paraćin, Yugoslavia, who was moved in 1989, and received capitalist citizenship in Austria with a new name in 2002) is an artist, researcher and writer. She works within and about contemporary art, art history, cultural studies and critical theory. She is interested in queerness, displays of global capital, coloniality and the East, forms of escape, early psychoanalysis as well as politics of memory and war. Hoffner works with video, photography, installation and performance. She employs means of appropriation such as restaging photographs, interviews and reports, and searches for ways to desynchronize normative belongings of body and voice, sound and image. She works explicitly against the current domination of corporate aesthetics, images of disgust and horror and the right-winged establishment by insisting on analysis, contextualization and reflection. Hoffner seeks to introduce temporalities, relations and spaces in-between iconic images and highly performative events of our totalizing contemporaneity.
