Dorit Margreiter

Dorit Margreiter was born in Vienna in 1967. From 1988 to 1992 she studied at the University (then College) of Applied Arts, Vienna. In 1994 she received the State Scholarship for Fine Arts, Austria. From 1995 to 1996 she was artist in residence in Fujino, Japan. From 1997 to 1998 she was sponsored by the International Studio Program of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. In 2001 she completed an artist in residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA. In 2001 she was awarded the Georg Eisler Prize and in 2002 the Otto Mauer Prize, in Vienna. In 2003 she received the Prize of the City of Vienna and in 2016 the Austrian Prize for Film and Media Art. In 2009 she participated in the Austrian Pavilion at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, Italy. Among others, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) dedicated a solo exhibition to her in 2019. In addition to her artistic activities, she is an author, curator as well as graphic designer. Since 2006 she has been a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Dorit Margreiter lives and works in Vienna and Los Angeles.

Margreiter is an important protagonist of a particular movement which began to question the prevailing systems of representation and communication in art at the outset of the 1990s. Together with Mathias Poledna and Florian Pumhösl, she embarked on several joint projects (1991-93), including Material, Texte, Interviews (1991), and the installation Impact (1993) for the exhibition "Kontext Kunst" in Graz.
In her approach, she has developed an interdisciplinary artistic practice that transcends questions normally inherent in art, and is influenced by cultural studies and touches on ethnological, architectural, and political connections. As a basic motif, Margreiter’s videos, photographs, and installations pursue the social spaces constructed by popular picture media. In so doing, her work illuminates a modern subjectivity and its chances of finding a localization and affiliation within a quotidian context.
Even her very first solo exhibition, "Mein Schlafzimmer in Prag" (1993), already referred to the motif of "beaming" as a metaphor for social departures and for popular culture as conveyed through the media, conjoining these themes with questions related to gender politics. The installation "Into Art" (1998), created for the exhibition "The making of," seized upon structural mechanisms of a soap opera, transferring these into the realm of art. The existing sociotope of the Generali Foundation was turned into a trailer forming the matrix of a fictional television series. In subsequent works such as "Studio City" (1999), "Some Establishing Shots" (1999) and "Short Hills" (1999/2000), Margreiter exposed the influence of fictions from the film and television industries on processes involving the search for one’s identity and the negotiation of social realities. Her latest exhibition, "Event Horizon" (2002), explores the interplay of the two categories, "experience" and "space," via the reproduction of a Guggenheim subsidiary located in Las Vegas.(Luisa Ziaja)