Annemarie Arzberger:

dreamed awake

3.–4.10.2025

The craft of puppet-making is a centuries-old tradition that was incorporated into the fine arts in the twentieth century. The connection between fine art and puppet theater opens up a lively and exciting field that can include motionless sculptures, performative gestures, and forms of movement in different media. Artists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, William Kentridge, Tony Oursler, and Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg have explored these interfaces in very different ways and thereby expanded opportunities for artistic expression. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a central figure of the Dada movement, working in the early twentieth century, designed not only abstract compositions but also artfully stylized puppets for the Dada play for puppet theater King Stag (1918). Her figures combine the aesthetics of geometrical abstraction with the physicality of puppet theater, while also being an expression of Dada social critique and the playful pleasure of experimentation. Taeuber-Arp’s work transcends the borders between artisanship, stage design, and performance. The South-African artist William Kentridge also operates in a realm between static image and movement. His shadow theater combines drawings, film, animation, and performance to make complex narratives. He uses puppets and shadow figures as the symbolic bearers of historical and political themes, such as the colonial past and Apartheid. Kentridge’s works are both poetical and critical, and their theatrical methods add a new dimension to the fine arts. US-American media artist Tony Oursler’s very different installations combine sculptural objects with videos of faces speaking that are projected onto deformed puppet bodies and other amorphous figures. These hybrid creatures are both irritating and fascinating; they address psychological conditions, media over-stimulation, and constructs of identity, and they thereby create a bridge between figural theater, video art, and sculpture.

All of these artistic approaches demonstrate how puppet theater becomes a medium of transformation, allowing bodies, materials, and images to enter into motion, and opening up a space for new forms of artistic expression between stage and medium, and object and narrative. Arzberger can be seen in this context, working between subject and object, and in the works shown here also between dream and wakefulness.

During the Corona pandemic Arzberger made costumes for an online series, and then she made several puppets for theater which became the protagonists in several productions. This proved to be a lasting influence on her own artistic work, and since then the theater has increasingly become the ​“home” of her figures and puppets, which she makes on the basis of her own drawings and paintings. Arzberger’s works revolve sensitively and subtly around current socially relevant issues. She approaches these with empathy and care, not pursuing a political agenda but instead designing a fantastic world that can serve as a place of refuge and longing. The concept of the dreamed awake show is based on several strategies that each complement the others. Arzberger’s puppets and masks are presented as independent works, as parts of a large-scale installation, and also activated in performances, so that Arzberger’s artistic production is experienced within a spatial and temporal setting that enables all its different qualities to unfold.

For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist has developed her first own performative presentation, with a setting for her puppets that is based above all on dance and lip-sync elements with musical moments and a combination of human-body and puppet theater. While other puppet characters like Gentleness, Mildness and Peaceful are gazing in awe at the stage, it is Dolores who plays the main role in this show. This name is certainly not coincidental; its Latin root means pain, which the puppet definitely expresses in her own way. Her golden eyes and long pointed teeth do not suggest anything childlike or unreservedly beautiful, and certainly are in no way expressing naivety – the kinds of attributes so often associated with puppet theater. On the stage, we can also see the three figures named Sisters of Fear, following the action closely as they move on their mobile plinths.

The light is dimmed, and dreamed awake unfolds as a series of scenes and situations with different artworks and arrangements – a lively spectacle that develops step by step before the eyes of the beholders, drawing them ever deeper into the piece‘s immersive world. Semi-transparent netting, a selection of different textiles, and other materials drape the scene, making it an interlaced playground for the senses. Detailed paintings, puppets, and other artworks meet up with an arrangement that deliberately refers to elements of DIY, or reminds us of children building a cave out of items of furniture and whatever else can be found in the household. For the music, the artist has selected works from the work of popular hits from her own childhood, as well as sounds of nature such as are used in meditation. In this form as a continuous theatrical narrative, this work is shown here as a première. On the second evening, the stage situation becomes a walk-through installation that is activated during the course of the Long Night of the Museums with short theatrical scenes and songs, performatively bringing to life this constellation of puppets, paintings, and stages, which together can also be seen as small retrospective of the artist’s work. In combining the allegedly childish medium of puppet theater, her own highly unusual pictorial imagery, and her act of transferring individual characters into a comprehensive and holistic pictorial world, Annemarie Arzberger creates a very idiosyncratic, playful and poetic, and also at the same time unpretentious work that delights and entertains, and yet can also be disturbing.