birgitt+ramsauer

Brigitt Ramsauer is an artist living in Germany. She is born in 1962, and has a strong theoretical and practical background in art creation, art communication, and art curating. Since 1992 she has been based in Berlin while travelling extensively to perform and show her work, lecture and teach at various art schools and universities both in Europe and the USA. She works with various media (installation, video, photography) but sees herself primarily as a performance artist, who not only aligns her own body and personality with different social environments, but also deliberately leaves behind visible traces. In the tradition of American and German Performance Art, she interferes with external contexts and marks the random remnants that other people unknowingly leave behind. During her performances she acts as a presenter and visual translator of the everyday, rather unimpressive human actions that can take place all over the world, and she often looks for the active participation of the audience. As a detective would do in a crime scene, she collects evidences that allow her to initiate an analysis of the sociological and cultural context in which her actions are taking place. In her project "Art : HOME - LESS" she invented her own language of performance in an urban environment: "I view the act of someone dropping carelessly a piece of paper onto the street as an 'unconscious' performance piece (see: ART : HOME - LESS Project New York, Marseille, Moscow, Berlin). I mark this 'uneventful' event and record it as a past gesture, like an archaeologist would do. Through my performances I want to bring awareness to certain characteristics that define the inner texture of a specific social environment. By highlighting behaviours and attitudes that people may not pay attention to and take for granted, such as standing in line, entering an elevator, or sleeping, my goal is to make people conscious of their actions, and of the consequences that these may have on other people or on the environment that surrounds them, without ever criticizing them." An interesting step was using her way of doing performance art to analyse and consult an industrial company, the high end interior company Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau, DWH in Dresden, where she invented a highly analytical and artistic expression linked to economic research and consulting. Thus, she was able to analyse the present status of the company and from there to develop future roads of business development for them. The results of analysis and the proposals were presented as - art. In summer 2008 she was invited by DWH to create a concept for an art project within the company. This project had the major issue to deal with the company as an object and freely create art in any media to express her observations and interpretations. The artist was not restricted by the company in terms of the concepts, research, and realization strategies as well as in timeline, volume or kind of activity. The artistic process and presentation should influence the self-perception how to expand business in the future and give eventually a visible potential improvement. As a result of the first work platform she presented three artistic concepts. All of those will be realized. With the first step, Birgit Ramsauer realized a photo documented performance series in already existing installations of the company. Therefore she related with her body size to the sculptural environments, which envisioned the quality of the space impression and the detail solutions of DWH. Secondly, she presented sketches of objects installations, which take over a dynamic aspect of movement, which relates to the dynamic process within the manufacturing of the company. At the end she opened her concepts and results in a lecture to all employees of the company. Her work can be found in numerous collections, including German National Museum collection, Berlin, and Tretjakow Gallery collection, Moscow, and the Public Library Collection, New York.

Please see [|www.birgitramsauer.net] for an encompassing documentation of her works.

I'm sure Birgit will inspire and enrich our network with her overwhelming energy, thrilling ideas, profound knowledge, large experience and her delightful character.

Jürgen Bergmann