Friedl Kubelka

Friedl Kubelka (born 1946), is an Austrian photographer and filmmaker. Her art is regared as part of the 20th-century movement known as Feminist Actionism or Viennese Actionism, where female artists would use their sexuality to express their innermost selves on camera. Kubelka's photographic works focus on accentuating temporality, seriality and the body.

Biography

Kubelka was born in London, then moved with her family to East Berlin and then Vienna, where she spent most of her childhood. Her parents were forced to leave Austria due to their political views, relocating their family to London. Kubelka began taking pictures at the age of twelve after receiving her first box camera from her father. At age sixteen, she started taking pictures of people, faces, and bodies.

From 1965 to 1969, Kubelka studied photography, and began film-making, at the Graphic Instruction and Research Institute in Vienna as Friedl Bondy. After completing her diploma examination to become a professional commercial photographer in 1971, she decided to run her own photography studio until 1997. Kubelka typically does not photograph strangers or people on the streets but rather friends, family and a lot of children. Kubelka is interested in capturing people around her that she knows, as well as photographing herself. She has also taken architectural photography and fashion photography. Kubelka's films often include a cast of family members, friends, colleagues and sometimes male strangers.

Kubelka is best known for Year’s Portraits, a project she begun in 1972, in which she photographed herself daily over the period of a year and then repeated the process every year since. In 1977, Friedl directed her first class in “artistic photography”. In 1978, she married Peter Kubelka, an Austrian filmmaker and theoritician, and changed her name from Friedl Bondy to Friedl Kubelka. On October 21, 1978, her daughter Louise was born in Vienna. When Louise was born, Friedl began photographing her and continued to do so until her eighteenth birthday, calling the series Lebensportrait Louise Anna Kubelka (Portrait Louise Anna Kubelka). Kubelka was awarded the State Prize for Photography, Austria’s most prestigious photography award, in 2005. She also had solo exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Fotogalerie in Vienna and the Netherlands Photo Museum in Rotterdam. Kubelka divorced Peter Kubelka in 2001 and in 2009 married Georg Gröller. She then changed herr name to Friedl Vom Gröller.

The School for Photography & Film in Vienna

In autumn of 1990, Kubelka founded the School for Artistic Photography in Vienna. The School for Artistic Photography in Vienna is the first school to devote itself to artistic photography in Austria. In 2006, she founded the School for Independent Film, dedicated to art of analog filmmaking.

Major works

Photography

• Jahresportraits (Year's Portraits). (1972/73-2012/13).
• Pin-Ups. (1973-1974)
• Reise (Voyage) Bed Series. (1974).
• Tagesportraits (One-Day-Portraits). (1974-1976).
• Passstücke (The Adaptives), Franz West. (1975).
• Lebensportrait Louise Anna Kubelka (Portrait Louise Anna Kubelka). (1978-1996).
• Das tausendteilige Portrait (One Thousand Changing Thoughts). (1980).

Filmography

• Erwin, Toni, llse. (1968-1969).
• Graf Zokan (Franz West). (1969).
• Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas. (1994).
• Eltern (Parents): Mutter (Mother), Vater (Father). (1997 & 1999).
• Spucken (Spitting). (2000).
• Psychoanalyse ohne Ethik (Psychoanalyses without Ethics). (2005).
• Heidi Kim at the W Hong Kong Hotel. (2010).
• La Cigarette. (2011).
• Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Me too, too, me too). (2012).