“Located between the image and object-based visual and body-based performing arts, Dittler has generated artistic forms without adopting a historically inscribed artistic vocabulary. Instead, her work makes visible physical processes which would otherwise remain, invisibly as well as unconsciously, inscribed in the body. Her experimental conception of art is thus based on emotional physical sensitivities rather than on formalist claims and expectations.[...]”
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LISA MORAVEC
art historian, performance sholar,
occasional critic and curator
“Iris Dittler’s performance-cum-installation titled »Is this repair?« not only takes recourse to medical utensils, but also explores possible repairs of the human body beyond medical and technical intervention. While medicine focusses on the restoration of a functionally efficient body, Dittler in her works shifts the centre of interest to the mutual influences between bodies and their environment – a dialogue in whose performative process she not only gauges, searches, and explores the respective sides and qualities, but also the exchange and merging of body, time, and space become the object of her expeditions. [...]”
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ANDREAS SPIEGL
media theorist
“Iris Dittler makes room in her works. A female body dancing, dazzling, moving as if underwater. The boundaries blur. Not only between outside and inside. Also between the levels of responsibilities: there is the choreographer as graphic artist, present as dancer, the body becomes mudra, a meditative symbol, but in the same moment stands for itself. [...]”
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SOPHIE REYER
writer, poet and composer
“In Dittler’s performances the human body is in a continuous dynamic relationship with the objects. These filigree, mysterious apparatuses, made of metal, aluminum, copper, and plexiglass, seem to be waiting for something to be done with them. As if they were summoning human bodies, and even in their absence, it is always a calling beset upon them. [...]”
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SABINA HOLZER
dancer, choreographer and writer
“Consequently, the artist does not offer us a coherent system of cool contemporaneity, rather the experience of sophisticated gestures of correspondence. The slowness intrinsic to this gesture is (and: should be) expected from the recipients as well. It takes concentration and time to comprehend a creation ultimately founded in a dual procedure of world and orientation. [...]”
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THOMAS BALLHAUSEN
author, literary and film scholar, publisher and translator
“From the earliest forms created by Iris Dittler to the objects produced in the context of her residency at 3 bis f, her entire formal vocabulary may be said to constantly move back and forth between the body (her body), thought (the object as idea), and the object (proper). The latter is born at a point in the body, and is sometimes a line or a posture. Its plastic properties and proportions are meticulously tested. [...]”
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DIANE PIGEAU
curator, 3 bis f, Aix-en Provence