Annemarie Arzberger:

dreamed awake

3.–4.10.2025

The craft of puppet-making is a centuries-old tradition that was eventually incorporated into fine arts’ production since 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, or Wael Shawky 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 articulating Dadaistic social critique and the playful pleasure of experimentation. Taeuber-Arp’s work transcends the borders between artisanship, stage design, and performance. In his shadow theater, the South-African artist William Kentridge also operates in a realm between static image and movement combining 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. 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. In Wael Shawky’s monumental cinematic works, puppets reconstruct historical events that still have consequences for global politics today.

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 also finds herself in this field of tension, oscillating between object and subject, and in this context between dream and wakefulness, she is able to performatively depict psychological states and childhood dreams that have not yet been lost. 

Arzberger began to make 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. Arzberger’s works revolve sensitively and subtly around current socially relevant issues. She approaches these with empathy and care, not pursuing a genuinely political agenda but instead designing a fantastic world that can serve as a place of refuge and longing: In dreamed awake, her puppets and masks are presented both as independent works, and also activated in performances. Arzberger’s characters are put in 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 with three scenes set in an imaginary spaceship, an exhibition, and the spaces that the scenes depict: the Schlouflaboar, the Houloudecks, and the Space Grotto Disco. The piece is a combination of physical theater and puppetry, performed by the artist together with her sister Katharina Arzberger and accompanied by musical interludes arranged by Manuel Obriejtan. While the puppet characters 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. The four Sisters of Fear will also be seen on stage, a species that is highly sensitive and internally torn, sharing their feelings with the audience.

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. The different scenes are spatially separated through semi-transparent netting, a selection of different textiles. Detailed paintings, puppets, and other artworks meet up with an arrangement that deliberately refers to elements of DIY, or reminds us of a dreamy staging of our childhood. 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 on the first night 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 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.