Standpoint Autotheory: Writing Embodied Experiences and Relational Artistic Practice

Standpoint Autotheory brings together essays from artists whose research-based work has been produced in the context of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (within it, after it, or despite it). With texts by Ana de Almeida & Mariel Rodríguez Rodríguez, Andrea Ancira, Cana Bilir-Meier, Lena Ditte Nissen, Eduard Freudmann, Nina Höchtl, Olena Khoroshylova, Mai Ling, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Sandra Monterroso, Elif Süsler-Rohringer, Stephanie Misa, and Sanja Lasic, the publication reflects on how the academy has directly and indirectly contributed to shaping a research attitude in the Austrian artistic scene and abroad.

The contributions explore the entanglements of subjectivity and criticality through various modes of thinking and artistic practice, including autoethnography, practices of the self, auto-historia teoría, standpoint theories, strong objectivity and situated knowledge, self-authority, narrativity and storytelling, radical positioning, performative philosophy, autofiction, and thinking-feeling. Through integrating embodied experiences with the production of theory, the practices featured in Standpoint Autotheory illuminate connections between the personal and political, and the individual and communal, ultimately aiming towards social transformation through questioning dominant epistemologies.

Copublished by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna