Biography
Pilz was born in 1936 in Haarlem in the Netherlands. [6] In 1939, when she was three years old, her family fled from the National Socialists to Semarang in Central Java, Indonesia. When the Japanese invaded Indonesia in March 1942, Pilz's father was sent to a concentration camp in Sumatra. She and her mother spent two years among 8,000 prisoners in Lampersari concentration camp, Semarang, Central Java. [9] [10] [8] In Pilz's case, seven women and two children lived in a tiny filthy room. They suffered from typhus and one of Pilz's legs became infected and as a result is shorter than the other. [9]
In 1954 Pilz went to Vienna to study photography at the Höheren Graphischen Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt, the Federal Training and Research Institute of Graphic Arts. [11] She worked with Hans Weiss as a commercial photographer in Vienna from 1971 to 1978. [11] In 1976, she received her Meisterprüfung (master's certification) in photography. [11]
Pilz was strongly affected by her arrest by plainclothes police officers at the Third Women's Festival in Vienna on 14 April 1978. She addressed these events through the creation of a body-centered series of self-portraits, communicating emotion to the audience both through expressive gestures and through the state of the linen jacket that she wore at the time of the arrest. These photographs, in which she is portrayed with crumpled clothes and in crouched postures, have been described as "one-second sculptures" or "flash-sculptures". [4] [11] [5]
In 1978 Pilz also joined the feminist artists network Internationalen Aktionsgemeinschaft bildender Künstlerinnen (International Action Community of Fine Artists, IntAkt). Her work is closely related to the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In her work she explored and reflected on the institution of marriage, working conditions of women, and the social role of women. [11] [12] For example, for the work "Arbeiterinnenaltar" (Workers altar, 1981), she photographed workers at the coffee roastery Eduscho and questioned working conditions. [13] Her photo sequence, The White Cell Project (1983–1985), placed her subjects within a small cardboard room, 165 centimeters wide, that concretized the weight and constraint of societal expectations and norms. She invited other artists to create works within the White Cell, including Renate Kordon [ de ], Linda Christanell [ de ], and Liesbeth Waechter-Böhm. [13] [14]
Pilz was a pioneer in media art in Austria. A well-known early work by Pilz was her intervention in a public space Kaorle am Karlsplatz (1982), for which she poured sand on the Karlsplatz in Vienna during the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) and had sun loungers set up. [15] [16] In 1991 Pilz created Delphi Digital, together with Roland Alton-Scheidl, for the Ars Electronica in Linz. The interactive digital installation engaged visitors in questioning environmental policy and democracy. [17] An updated version using smartphones was exhibited in 2015–2016. [18]
From 1990 to 1992 Pilz worked as a lecturer at the Technischen Universität Wien (Vienna University of Technology). In 1991 she was a visiting professor at Pandios Universität Athen, and from 1993 to 1994 she worked at Technischen Universität Graz. [11]
Pilz has donated many of her early works to the city of Vienna, including 2,000 prints and 10,000 negatives from the 1970s to the 1990s. A retrospective of her work, Meilensteine (Milestone) was shown in Vienna in 2015, [11] [2] [13] and her work is part of internationally shown exhibits on The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s (2016–2018). [19] [20] [21] [22] [23]
In 2018, Margot Pilz was one of five women featured in Sie ist der andere Blick (She is the other gaze), a documentary film created by Christiana Perschon and artist Iris Dostal. The film focuses on feminist artists of the 1970s who were part of the Viennese art scene. The film examines the ways in which their artistic practice and their feminism interact, as they recall challenges and obstacles that they faced and how they overcame them in both personal and political spaces. The other women filmed are Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell [ de ], Lore Heuermann [ de ], and Karin Mack. The film won a 2018 Theodor Körner Prize. [24]
“HERSTORY – 36.000 YEARS OF GODDESSES & IDOLS ”, Margot Pilz, 2012
