Barbara Wolfram

Austria (residence)
affiliation: Film Academy Vienna at the mdw – University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna
en

Barbara Wolfram holds a PhD from the Film Academy Vienna/ mdw and a Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Vienna. In her dissertation she was researching about on-Screen representations of Gender and Diversity in Austrian Feature Films. In her PostDoc she co-leads the Artistic Research Project Building Bridges in Polarized Societies by means of Art and Research. Film - Wien - ArbeiterInnenmileu- Rechtspopulismus funded by the City of Vienna (MA7) where she and Paulus Wagner research about the consolidating effect of the medium film in polarized societies. In her second PostDoc project Barbara researches on Cinematic Autosociobiographies in the PEEK project (FWF): Confronting Realities. Working on Cinematic Autosociobiographies.

Barbara has conducted international research and study stays at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, at the film school ENS Louis Lumiére, Paris and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. In addition to her academic work, she is a theatre and film director and artistic director of the international theatre company .EVOLve, which she co-founded (including Volkstheater Wien, Schauspielhaus Wien). On the side, Barbara podcasts with Bianca J. Rauch about Gender and Diversity portrayal and Representation in their film studies podcast Ned wuascht - wir geh'n fisch'n and is politically active at KILL the TRAUERspiel, an initiative that works for more gender justice and diversity on Austrian stages.  

www.barbarawolfram.com / www.nedwuascht.com / www.killthetrauerspiel.com/

research

research expositions

  • (NOT) ENTERING EVERY ROOM - Exploring autosociobiographies via liminal crossing points of social class and the emotion shame (2023) author(s): Barbara Wolfram, Christina Wintersteiger published in: Research Catalogue
    (Not) Entering Every Room, conducted 2020/21 at Film Academy Vienna/ mdw - University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, set out to use the emotion shame as a focus to reveal and explore unconscious liminal crossing points in our biographies and perceptions of social class, building on our previous research on cinematic (auto)sociobiographies (2020). We are shaped, guided and scarred by our socialization and the society surrounding us. Each individual history brings with it a different knowledge repertoire about what belonging or not-belonging, „normal“ or „abnormal“ means. Spoerhase (Politik der Form 2017) describes the exploration and disclosure of one’s own biography in relation to social context & class, to one’s body, time & place of birth as “auto-sociobiographical”. He refers to the literary works of Annie Ernaux or Didier Eribon where individual life stories evoke a collective memory of a certain time and place, revealing liminal experiences of social class. One emotion that was mentioned more often than any other in these literary works, was shame. To explore our own histories of experiences and the attached knowledge repertoire, we used the methodology of collective (auto)sociobiographical exploration via a multi-layered artistic approach. Body work (Chechov, Shdanoff), writing improvisations and group explorations via zoom were used to probe the methodology of (auto)sociobiographical exploration in the light of shame and social class. Research on cinematic (auto)sociobiographies is still very new. We aim at contributing a method of exploration to the field of cinematic form and content production informed by artistic research methods.
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