KERSTIN KRAUS

Gisèle Vienne

29 July until October 5 2025, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pmThursday, 10 am to 7 pm

The film ‘Kerstin Kraus’ (2024) by Gisèle Vienne is about Kerstin, played by actress and puppeteer Kerstin Daley-Baradel, and the ventriloquist's dummy Frankie. Two characters who, however, represent a woman - her name: Kerstin Kraus. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Kerstin and Frankie have a sibling-like relationship: Frankie reflects an expanded existence of Kerstin. It also becomes clear that Kerstin is the daughter of a famous ventriloquist who travelled the world with Frankie. Kerstin herself secretly made paper dolls as a child - her father forbade her to make real dolls: they were too similar to dead bodies. Kerstin's complicated childhood is apparently responsible for her current dissociation, the split consciousness in which she appears locked up and lonely. Accompanied by atmospheric music, the entire film conveys a sense of eeriness. It is about questions of existence and death and about the portrait of a woman in which the complexity of the human psyche finds expression.2024, 11:37 min
Gisèle Vienne (born 1976 in Charleville-Mézières) is a French-Austrian choreographer, artist and theatre and film director. Vienne's productions draw on elements from dance and puppetry and thematise human trauma and social taboos. Since 2003, she has been creating an ‘ensemble’ of more than 100 life-size puppets. For Vienne, the figures are a sign of dissociation, the splitting off of pain from one's own body into something else that creates distance from traumatic experiences.