Meet the artist Gisèle Vienne in conversation with Romeo Castellucci

Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer, theatre and film director. From an early age, she was trained in visual arts by Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak, studied dance, and music, and later philosophy, and puppeteering. Over the past twenty years, her work has toured in Europe, Asia, and America, among others the productions and films Showroomdummies #1, #2, #3, #4 (2001 – 2020), I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008), This is how you will disappear (2010), LAST SPRING: A Prequel (2011), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) in collaboration with Puppentheater Halle, Crowd (2017), L’Étang (2021), and EXTRA LIFE (2023). In 2021, she directed the film Jerk and in 2024 Kerstin Kraus. Vienne has frequently exhibited her photographs and installations in museums, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. In 2024/2025 she presents two new exhibitions for the Contemporary Art Center Haus am Waldsee and the Georg Kolbe Museum as a focus on her work inaugurated as part of Berlin Art Week 2024.  She published her photography in several books. A new book of photographs of her works and performances, This Causes Consciousness to Fracture, created in collaboration with Estelle Hanania and Elsa Dorlin, is published by Spector Books in November 2024. Her work has led to various publications and the original music of her shows to several albums

Romeo Castellucci – director and set, lighting and costume designer born in Cesena in 1960 – has been active since the early 1980s and his works have been presented and produced by leading theaters and international festivals in over sixty countries across every continent. He has been director of the Theater Section at the Venice Biennale, artiste associé at the Avignon Festival and guest director at the Schaubühne Theater in Berlin. He is a member of the Royal Academy in Belgium, and was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale and an honorary degree from the University of Bologna. He has been made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic, and amongst his many top prizes he has also won two Golden Mask for opera. Castellucci has been Grand Invité of Triennale Milano for the four-year period 2021-2024.