Kunsthalle Wien

In Rags
Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946) ranks among the most important and, at the same time, most controversial authors in the German-speaking world. Exploring omnipresent (male) structures of control and violence in her manifold literary production, which encompasses poetry, prose, essays, radio plays, novels, and plays, she has inseparably linked art with taking a sociopolitical stance. Her approach to fashion is equally self-reflective and critical, for: “There are only few things I know as much about as clothes. I do not know much about me, am not very interested in me either, but I think that my passion for fashion can replace me for myself [...]. I get involved in fashion so that I do not have to get involved in me, for I would drop myself almost the very moment I had a grip on me.” Typical for the author’s pointed works are blocks of texts without paragraphs in which she interweaves various types of texts and levels of language.

Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. She lives and works in Munich and Vienna.