SALON TALK

Salon Talk was conceived for the exhibition The Place to Be. Salons als Orte der Emanzipation in the Jewish Museum Vienna.      http://www.jmw.at/en/exhibitions/place-be-salons-spaces-emancipation

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The Jewish Museum Vienna has invited the Viennese actress and artist Anna Mendelssohn to make a movie for the exhibition The Place to Be. Salons - Spaces of Emancipation.  Anna Mendelssohn is the granddaughter of Hilde Spiel, who plays an important role in the exhibition as the author of the book about Fanny von Arnstein and as a postwar salonière herself.

The film shows a contemporary salon conversation in which Anna Mendelssohn discusses the issues of emancipation, identity, and feminism with a small group of people invited by her in the spirit of the salon as a space for political discourse. Villa Wertheimstein, where the prominent hostesses Josephine and Franziska von Wertheimstein held a salon in the second half of the 19th century, is the place of exchange. In the original interior, "salonière" Anna Mendelssohn and her salon guests Dudu Kücükgöl, Jens Kastner, Gin Müller and Elisabeth Tambwe (re)activate the present-day museum site as a space in which - as once in the salons - a different society is conceivable. Catalogue text by Astrid Peterle (curator)

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Salon participants:

Anna Mendelssohn is an actress and artist.

Gin Müller is a dramaturg, theatre scholar, performer and queer theorist.

Jens Kastner is a sociologist and art historian.

Elisabeth Tambwe is a choreographer and visual artist.

Dudu Kücükgöl is a graduate in business education and is former board member of the Muslim Youth of Austria

Directing: Anna Mendelssohn in collaboration with Yosi Wanunu

Camera: Martin Putz

Sound and Editing: Michael Strohmann