For her project “Red Herring” Raffaela Bielesch was awarded the Theodor Körner Prize in 2022. The work combines different stories from her home village of Stripfing in eastern Lower Austria, which are set in or around the Second World War. Dropped chaff (tin foil strips that interfere with radar) as Christmas tree decorations, a family secret, and a dead man on the last day of the war: different narratives are combined to form a dense fabric that does not create a coherent story. Instead, the artist strives to show how exceptional situations and conflicts – both social and private – find expression in rather inconspicuous everyday situations. How they become embedded in places and objects with memorable value, which keep these tensions just as present as they conceal them through their everyday “harmlessness” – like a skillful diversionary manoeuvre.

Through a complex fusion of the photographic and the performative that goes beyond pure documentation, the artist succeeds in finding an artistic expression for the questions that move her: Which artifacts remain? How are they used? And what does the handling of the object reveal about unspoken, sometimes forgotten stories? This year’s Vienna Art Week, which has the motto “Facing Time”, is therefore the ideal setting for the realization of the project, which subtly deals with personal and collective coping strategies regarding historical events. Curator Stephanie Damianitsch also sheds light on the artistic project from a psychoanalytical perspective.