Ale Bachlechner is a performance and video artist living in Cologne and Vienna.
Her work is involved with communication and affects, forms of relationships and pitfalls of neoliberalism. Central aspects are the examination of theory, literature, text and language as well as physicality, gender and performance for the camera. Her works vary in size from solos and single-channel videos to works with a team of several performers, artists, musicians and technicians as well as multi-channel video installations and video series.
Her performative means can be described with the term drag. Not in the limited sense of crossdressing “as the other gender” in an assumed gender dichotomy, but in the broader sense of an open performance of non-identity. She deals intensively with social norms and modes of representation and strives especially for a queering of femininity. She creates personas/characters/alter-egos and uses them as a means, to explore “what is bothering her” from the personal to issues of current social crises, to find a perspective or a way of dealing with them.
She studied Comparative Literature in Innsbruck and Media Arts at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
Her works include the temporary dating agency “Twelve Roses” (2013) in Beirut, Lebanon, the participatory performance coaching institute “This Is Not A Competition” (2016), the online TV series “Studio Hallo” (2018), the solo performance “Men and me” (2019), and a long-term collaboration with the dancers and choreographers Artmann&Duvoisin.
From 2018-2021 she was an artistic member of the Junges Kolleg of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She has held numerous teaching positions in performance and video at the University of Cologne, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Caspar David Friedrich Institute Greifswald, Bauhaus University Weimar, and University of Siegen.
Her works are in the archive and distribution of the imai Foundation Düsseldorf and are presented at festivals, symposia and exhibitions, such as: Art Cologne, Videonale Bonn, Impulse Festival, EMAF Osnabrück, Kasseler Dokfest, Kurzfilmfestival Köln, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, HMKV Dortmund and Diagonale Graz.
Her monograph “I’m Sure Everybody’s Doing Their Best” (2022) was published by DISTANZ.