Disruptive Realities:
The Lives and Works of Contemporary Women Artists
9 Jul 2026, 7 pm

“Can you make a living from your art?” What assumptions or prejudices underlie this question? How do women artists respond when they are asked this proverbial question?

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 women artists from various disciplines and at different stages of life. While doing so, they turn the spotlight on the conditions of making art and bring to light what usually remains invisible in a finished piece: structural inequality, economic pressure, a lack of security and the exhaustion that often accompanies artistic practice.

The project will be preserved in the Archives of the Akademie der Künste thanks to a gift. To mark this new acquisition, Dorothea Schöne will talk with Friederike von Rauch and Stefanie Schweiger about the concept, and with a few of the artists interviewed ‒ Celine Basra, Caroline Schnitzer and Heidi Sill ‒ about their experiences and strategies in daily life. Selected video clips will be screened.