Statement 
Christiana Perschon has been awarded the prestigious Erste Bank Art Award 2024. This recognition reflects Perschon’s outstanding artistic achievements, which deeply impressed the jury. They commended Perschon’s work for its sharp feminist position, at once subtly confrontational, softly resistant, delicately immediate and always concretely embodied. She establishes collaborative settings, where interaction guides the dramaturgy and shapes the imagery, dissolving the hierarchy between who looks and who is looked at, who films and who performs, who speaks and who doesn’t. The camera is no longer solely the prosthesis of the filmmaker’s body, but an active interface and a third eye in itself, exerting its own agency. In her films, the artist does not only deconstruct the objectifying patriarchal grasp on female bodies, which enclosed them in specific social functions (reproductive and domestic). She rather pays homage to inspirational resistant figures, to their working and living practices, weaving their singular paths within a transgenerational framework. Perschon expands the understanding of collective care, of social performance, of gendered labor, and ultimately, of feminist filmmaking. 

Jury Members   
Lisa Butzenlechner (Director of Austrian Cultural Forum Ottawa)  
Ruth Goubran (Head of Sponsoring Erste Bank, Vienna)   
Nevena Janković (BLOCKFREI Collective, Executive Management and Artistic Direction of DAS WEISSE HAUS, Vienna)   
Hana Ostan Ožbolt (Independent Curator and Writer, Vienna)  
Jason St-Laurent (Curator at SAW Centre, Ottawa)      

Finalists 2024  
Jeremias Altmann, Florian Aschka & Larissa Kopp, Oscar Cueto, Johannes Gierlinger, Lisa Großkopf, Elisabeth Molin, Ryts Monet, Yoshinori Niwa, Aykan Safoğlu, Christina Werner