Ricarda Denzer

installative work “La Croûte de Chou” (2007), at the center of which stands a conversation with the Indian union activist Namrata Bali. Bali speaks of sustainable and democratic structures with great intensity, her goal being to strengthen her organization in order to better “organize the unorganized.” The visual level here is dominated by a female prompter, whose whispered text consists of associatively ordered comments by a tax advisor and a coaching team, as well as of fragments from financial and economic news. These elements were brought together by the artist to form an interlaced portrayal of contemporary artists’ present-day occupational reality, working conditions, and generally precarious circumstances. Denzer spent several years ordering her artistic ideas, thoughts, associations, and questions in the notebooks “Aufzeichnungen 2006–2012,” which thus amount to a visualization of her thought processes. For the artist, these densely written- and drawn-upon notebooks function as “audiovisual memory minutes,” filled parallel to the creation of her works and exhibited together with them as “footnotes of production” (Christa Benzer). A logical consequence of this was the 2012 audio piece Perplexities, which she created together with sound artist Peter Szely; the basis for this transmedia composition is supplied by Denzer’s transcribed notes. Denzer’s artist book, likewise entitled “Perplexities” (Berlin, 2013), makes reference to Hannah Arendt, who wrote that, in view of the helplessness and perplexities of our world, the most we can do is to think about them together. This book contains numerous interviews, text collages, and audiovisual protocols pertaining to various projects by Denzer, as well as presentations of recent artistic output. C.E.