Disruptive Realities
The lives and work of contemporary female artists
9 Jul 2026, 7 pm

“Can you make a living from your art?” What assumptions or prejudices underlie this question? How do female artists respond when they are asked this time and again? “Disruptive Realities” (2025) is an artistic-documentary exhibition project by Friederike von Rauch and Stefanie Schweiger. In video works, they have recorded conversations with 20 female artists from various disciplines and at different stages of life. In doing so, they turn the spotlight on the conditions of artistic work and bring to light what usually remains invisible in the finished piece: structural inequality, economic pressure, a lack of security and forms of exhaustion that accompany artistic practice.

Thanks to a donation, the project can be preserved in the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. To mark the handover, Dorothea Schöne will speak with Friederike von Rauch and Stefanie Schweiger about the concept, and with the interviewed artists Celine Basra, Caroline Schnitzer and Heidi Sill about their experiences and strategies in everyday life. Selected film sequences will be shown.