Performance
WE STITCH TOGETHER Saturday, April 11, from 3 to 6 pm Knitting as a feminist and collective artistic practice with Lea Abendstein and Isabel Peterhans, registration: office@kunstraum-schwaz.at
In WE STITCH TOGETHER, we open the exhibition space and invite you to join us for some knitting. Inspired by Peterhans' Strickette, we focus on knitting as a collective practice. We want to detach needlework, with its feminine connotations, from the domestic sphere and instead place it in the context of subversive, feminist action. While knitting together, we exchange experiences and knowledge and read/listen to texts on feminist, natural philosophical, and anti-capitalist topics.
Flirt brings together a selection of works by Innsbruck-based artists Lea Abendstein and Isabel Peterhans and provides insights into their artistic interaction. Rather than presenting the results of a clearly defined collaboration, the exhibition sees itself as a means of rapprochement—as part of an open-ended process. In working toward the exhibition, the two artists unexpectedly discovered many points of contact in their working methods. An intensive exchange of emails accompanied this dialogue. Art appears here as a relational practice, exhibiting as a method that makes the boundaries of one's own self and who one believes oneself to be porous. Who are we if we do not engage with each other, if we are not connected? How can we succeed in building a deeper relationship with the world? Connection, writes Kae Tempest, requires fully accepting and experiencing the present moment. Creativity can be a way “to achieve connection and enter into a space of greater connectedness with those who share the moment with you.”[1]
[1] Kae Tempest, Verbundensein. Suhrkamp, 2021, 15f.
Text: Veronika Riedl
Lea Abendstein studied photography and fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She works as an art educator at bilding, an art and architecture workshop for children and young people, and since 2021 as a freelance artist and, since 2025, also as a shiatsu practitioner in Tyrol and Vienna. She is part of the feminist soft punk band kill-the band and enjoys eating spinach. Her work has been awarded the Wolf Suschitzky Prize for Photography and the Josef Franz Würlinger Prize of the City of Innsbruck.
lea.abendstein.net
Isabel Peterhans studied visual communication with a focus on illustration at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Design Art Film and at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She has been a freelance illustrator, artist, and art educator since 2012 and has lived with her family in Innsbruck since 2018. Her work appears in national and international magazines and books.
www.isabelpeterhans.ch
image © Lea Abendstein Isabel Peterhans
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